Sign of the Times

05:48 Friday, 10 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 72.32°F Pressure: 1004hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 155

Ordinarily, I'd say that it's pretty shocking that a research neuroscientist doesn't understand the fundamentals of probability, but given, well, everything about our present circumstances, I guess it makes sense that Dr. Andrew Huberman doesn't.

I guess the only thing you can do is laugh. (I'm trying to get my sentiment analysis out of the red!) This isn't exactly on point, but it did come to mind. Also the trap that expertise in one area seems to fool many people into believing it extends to areas they know nothing about. Still, a "research" scientist ought to have a fairly keen appreciation of probability math, shouldn't they?

Well, it's not rocket science, is it?

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Hate Is Embedded...

06:03 Friday, 10 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 72.39°F Pressure: 1005hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 163

...in the former states of the Confederacy.

(This will do nothing for my sentiment analysis.)

Are people "basically good"?

I don't know. I know that some people seem genuinely good, like Sir Nicholas Winton.

But far too many of us seem readily capable of committing genuine evil, or tolerating it.

It seems that centuries of enslaving people has saturated the soil of the Confederacy with hatred. And some people grow up with it as a part of their nature, like fish in water. They float in it, it bears them up, and they are utterly oblivious to it.

The thing about the Legacy Museum in Montgomery is that you're looking at centuries of history, and that the terrible beliefs that sustained that evil across those centuries extend right up to the present.

Slavery may not exist, Jim Crow may be down (but not out, apparently), but the hatred is still present.

The current propaganda slogan is "Heritage, not hate."

Hate is their heritage.

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Further to the Foregoing

06:43 Friday, 10 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.53°F Pressure: 1005hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 25

I've got to get out and go for my walk, but I started down a Confederacy rabbit hole and it's very depressing.

It's also interesting.

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Ignorance

08:16 Friday, 10 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.87°F Pressure: 1005hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 380

If you're not feeling "hopeless and broken," you're not paying attention.

One of the common threads in our present crisis, perhaps the most important one, is ignorance.

Hatred demands ignorance, a view of the world narrowly shaped by powerful interests. Public education is anathema to the right. It's much easier to manipulate the masses if you keep them ignorant and prey on their emotions.

But the "powerful" are educated. Isn't that a contradiction?

No, because it's about preserving power and privilege. It's possible for the powerful and the privileged to hate, despite their education. They're still ignorant when it comes to viewing the world through a wider aperture, one where they aren't the center of the universe. That's another form of ignorance, but it isn't a barrier to achieving wealth and power. In many ways, it's self-reinforcing. They believe they "earned" their positions of power and privilege, and they work hard to protect that blind spot.

It's no mystery why we haven't confronted the challenges of climate change, inequality, species loss, over-development. It's not in the interests of the powerful and the privileged to do so. Instead, they obfuscate, deny, demonize and use every tool at their disposal to promote ignorance and confusion.

The state where hatred thrives, and where it can be used as a tool.

For a long time, we weren't confronting "the limits to growth." It was easy to mask or ignore the dynamics of enforced ignorance. Today, we're bumping up against those limits. Indeed, we're in overshoot. The privileged and the powerful who hate, the ones who want to preserve their caste at the expense of the rest of us, must now work openly, and harder. And we're witnessing it.

One of our local Republican legislators, Representative Randy Fine likes to refer to public schools as "government schools," where students are presumably "indoctrinated" into a leftwing liberal agenda.

Florida wants to outlaw the used of "climate change" in government. Enforced ignorance.

Banning abortion at six weeks when most women don't even know they're pregnant. Relying on ignorance.

The list goes on.

I don't know how to stop it, but I know it won't go away unless we talk about it.

Ignorance is both their sword and their shield, and we have to fight it.

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Wind

07:39 Saturday, 10 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 70.93°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 98% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 304

I wasn't going to do this morning's mashup, but changed my mind.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind. Seneca

and

Obstacles look large or small according to whether you are large or small. Orison Swett Marden

Seneca was an ancient stoic philosopher; Marden a self-help, "success" guru from the late 19th, early 20th century.

Again, briefly, these are two quotations selected at random from a Tinderbox document of nearly 500 of them. Most of them are aphorisms of this kind.

Both quotes deal with perception, which is a subjective faculty. I struggle a bit with Seneca's first assertion because it isn't clear to me what a "plan" would be without an intention, or an "aim." But, not having the "right wind," might be considered an obstacle.

What Seneca suggests to me is that, if you feel as though your plan was thwarted by the wind, then your intention was never really your aim. What he's saying is that a "plan" is nothing, if you lack the commitment to achieving the goal. Knowing is subjective, but it is different than guessing, or hoping, or wishing. Knowing is a commitment. "Know what harbor he is making for."

Marden's quote is very stoic as well. While the measurement of size may be objective, the characterization of "large" or "small," is a subjective, relative perception.

"Whether you are large or small," is self-knowledge, implying a commitment to oneself. To "know thyself," requires commitment, and is the work of a lifetime.

At least until such time as you know that the self is an illusion having an experience, in which case, go to the head of the class.

"I don't know, I just go with the flow."

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Bill Gates

09:58 Saturday, 10 May 2025

❝

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times.

Source
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Meta is Dying

11:48 Sunday, 10 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 55.22°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 60% Wind: 8.1mph
Words: 3

Good. (Gift link.)

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Green Acres

11:51 Sunday, 10 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 55.71°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 8.1mph
Words: 36

This is from three days ago.

Went to the gym this morning. I'm still recovering. Called Mom to wish her a happy Mother's Day. Now I just want to take a nap.

The beat goes on...

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Apple Blossom

13:49 Sunday, 10 May 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 59.77°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 48% Wind: 12.39mph
Words: 1138

There's a small, scrawny apple tree at the back end of our property. Last fall I saw one apple on it. I did not try it. I don't know if it had more fruit and the deer ate them all or not. But there are a lot of blossoms on it today, so I'll try to keep a closer eye on it.

Last week I was thinking about data. Stuff. Well, information anyway. Things too trivial to remember, but too important to forget. I got that phrasing from Thomas Erickson, though I don't think it appears in the paper he wrote about Proteus. Way back in the latter years of the previous century Erickson had a web site, maybe even a blog, I don't remember. But I recalled his description of an electronic notebook he created using Hypercard.

To this day, I recall reading about that notebook with excitement and admiration. It was something that appealed to me deeply, and summoned all the optimism and enthusiasm I had back then for how computers could make our lives better.

Well, fast forward a generation or so, and I think I've finally gotten around to building my own version of Proteus, Captain's Log.

The impetus for building Captain's Log came from some success I was having automating the marmot, working with guys like Jack Baty, and the folks at the Tinderbox meetups and at the forum. The inspiration was Proteus.

Having created it, using it has been, well, a hit or miss affair. Mostly miss.

But today, it's becoming an integral part of my life, to the point where I'm beginning to alter my daily habits to better exploit its value. (I found the link to the Proteus paper in Captain's Log, because I knew I'd bookmarked it. Searching on "notebook" surfaced it quickly, though it's clear I need to do some organization.)

For most of my life, I've been blessed with a fairly decent memory. I seldom experienced a problem or embarrassment as a result of forgetting something. I seldom made notes, didn't really keep a calendar. I played with "personal digital assistants," like the Newton, PalmOS products from Handspring, even that Windows OS that went into handheld devices. "CE"? But they were never an integral part of my life

These days my memory, "ain't what it used to be." I don't know if that's a consequence of aging, or retirement. When I was "working," I was exercising my "working memory," regularly. I've been retired since 2013, and it just hasn't been as important to remember things, and I find that I don't do it as well anymore.

Enter Captain's Log, and information "too trivial to remember, but too important to forget."

I mentioned last week that I was developing a Tinderbox document for the new house, planning to capture all the information about the design and construction of the house. It could eventually become something of an owner's manual. Either for me, or for whoever ends up owning the place after we're gone.

I started writing AppleScripts to capture information about the house. This wasn't especially challenging, because they were largely duplicating those I'd written for Captain's Log. But that prompted a bit of reflection. Did I want to have two ways to capture information, having to kind of mentally shift gears at the time of capture, trying to recall which script to invoke.

So I've been working a bit on both the New House Project, and Captain's Log, adding some additional prototypes, changing some of the built-in automations, while this capture process marinated in the back of my mind.

I've decided that I'm going to perform all capture with Captain's Log. In its original conception, I'd intended to include a review of each days entries, either at the end of the day or the first thing the following morning. Like much else, it was mostly aspirational.

But I discovered I could copy a note from the Log and paste it into NHP, without losing any of the attributes. I may have known this before, but it's never been something I've done regularly with Tinderbox.

So the process now is to capture an email, a phone call, a web page, a file using Captain's Log, and each morning, review the previous day's entries and copy the ones relevant to the house over to the NHP document. During the review, prior to copying, I can add tags such that when pasted into an Inbox container, action code within the Inbox will place the note in the relevant container.

I still have more work to do to refine the structure of the New House Project. As it's currently constructed, I have no agents, just containers. Agents can gather aliases of notes based on the content of their attributes, including tags. So an HVAC agent would gather all notes of any type that contain either an HVAC tag, or perhaps I'll create a "System" attribute, that might associate that note with a particular house system, like HVAC, septic, plumbing, water treatment, electricity, network, lighting, etc.

I modified the AppleScript I used to log email to include an attribute for the date received. That hadn't been important before, but I want to have a chronological record of all the email correspondence in the NHP document. So I had to create that attribute and add a couple of lines to the AppleScript to capture that date and place it in the Tinderbox note, and I had to alter the prototype to make Received a displayed attribute.

NHP is what's driving the requirement for a daily review, because I'm capturing so much data about the house. But it affords the side benefit that I get more use out of the other notes I'm creating, by adding appropriate tags, additional text, due dates and so on in the course of reviewing them. So Captain's Log improves through regular use and review, and NHP becomes a valuable record of the construction of our new home.

I've used Tinderbox for more than twenty years, but for nearly all that I've used it as a kind of content management system for the marmot, and for Groundhog Day before it. I'd play with different documents from time to time, but nothing ever stuck from a utility standpoint. This has.

There are lots of "everything bucket" apps. I have Eagle Filer and DevonThink, but I don't use them. I think this is where long years of using one app can begin to pay dividends, as I don't have to learn another app's philosophy, or user interface. I mostly get Tinderbox, though it does trip me up from time to time.

Anyway, kind of excited. Something to do that feels productive, empowering. So much so that, here it is, an 1100+ word post!

Thanks, if you've read all of it!

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