People are horrible...

08:29 Tuesday, 15 May 2018
Words: 632

Perhaps the second most well known thing ever said by Jean Paul Sartre, after "Au revoir, gophér," is, "Hell is other people."

Tru dat.

Also true, what Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar, "All men have feet of clay." Or words to that effect.

Which is pretty much why everything sucks, especially social media. Because far too much of it is about judging other people, which is itself just a form of signaling to indicate what tribe you're in.

I've pretty much weened myself off Facebook. I still visit the Apple II groups I belong to, but I just dive into my main stream every other day or so, like a bunch of posts and then get the hell out of there before the stench starts to get to me. And occasionally I'll post something that really belongs here, but I'm lazy.

Feet of clay. Sue me.

But I haven't yet weened myself from Twitter, and it's beginning to feel as though I may have to. Same reason, too much tweeting about "other people" by "other people."

Yesterday it was someone tweeting about how horrible Dr. Richard Feynman was. And, no doubt, he was. He still did some good work though, but there's no room for nuance when you're virtue-signaling. And also Watson of Watson and Crick fame. A horrible person by many accounts. Racist and misogynist, the only thing he's missing is Republican, but that kind of goes by definition, am I right? (See how that works?)

Today it was someone ragging on Letterman, another horrible person. Yes, yes, I know.

Then there's this guy, in the NY Times, who writes "Liberals, You're Not As Smart As You Think," (You Are). I fixed that title, because I think that one really is just as smart as one thinks. "Thinking" being constrained by, perhaps, one's intelligence; otherwise, what, we could be smarter than we think? You'd think we'd know that, right? Never mind, I digress.

In any event, I'm pretty sure Gerard Alexander has never heard of the idea of irony. And I seriously question the intelligence of whoever it was at the NY Times who thought that piece was worthy of publication. Every now and then I consider canceling my subscription to the Times, and that piece was just about the one that did it. I'm still thinking about it.

I get it. There are horrible, mean people in the world. But that's not us, right? It's those other people! We're the good ones.

A good friend of mine stabbed me in the back several months ago. Never saw it coming, though in hindsight, it was all right there in front of me. I'm still not over it. Bitch about it all the time to people who know us. I really need to get over it, but that's probably going to take a little more time. Not that we'll ever be friends again. At some point, I suppose the best I can hope for is that I would piss on him if he was on fire. But I'm not there yet.

Anyway, yes, people suck. Everyone sucks. We know. Especially public figures, because public figures typically become public figures because they did something wonderful. (Except criminals.) And all these narratives sort of write themselves, eventually comes the inevitable downfall.

Still waiting for the other shoe to drop on Mr. Rogers.

I mean Hitchens, that rat-bastard, went after Mother Theresa for God's sake. So yeah, the jury's still out on my neighbor as far as I can tell. If I'm lucky, I'll be dead before someone discovers his dark secret.

People are horrible. Which is why social media sucks.

Another blinding glimpse of the obvious, brought to you as a public service by the tireless misanthrope at Nice Marmot (formerly Groundhog Day).

Data Point

06:44 Wednesday, 15 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 74.66°F Pressure: 1006hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 234

Haven't spoken with the marmot for a few days. I'd closed it on the iMac and opened it on the MBP on Sunday, though I didn't really need to. I closed it from the MBP using Screens, logging into the iMac "remotely." The iMac's UI is tiny on the 14" MBP, and I think I clicked the wrong button and discarded changes because the Cybertruck post was missing this morning.

So, expecting nothing but having nothing to lose, I tried Revert from the File menu again. The interface acted normally this time (Perhaps updating to Sonoma 14.5 helped?) But what was odd was that the version I wanted showed a blank image with a faded iCloud download icon. I clicked that and hoped for the best.

Howard Oakley has said that versions are stored locally on the Mac. Maybe that's changed?

Anyway, after some roaring fans and a lengthy period of the Spinning Pinwheel of Infinite Futility™, the desired version with the Cybertruck post appeared and I clicked Revert (or something). That process seemed to take less time, and didn't involve the roar of cooling fans, and the canonical version of the marmot was restored.

I clicked Save right away, because when this has seemingly worked in the past, Tinderbox usually crashed immediately after.

No crash.

I think Apple may have fixed something in 14.5, which would be cool.

Anyway, here we are.

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Tedium

07:04 Wednesday, 15 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 74.3°F Pressure: 1006hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 341

I follow a number of "tech" blogs because I occasionally learn something that might be useful, or get an insight into something that improves my understanding of something. But there's also a lot of noise in tech blogs. Just like in photography forums, especially "gear" ones.

It seems that many of the Mac illuminati are disenchanted with the M4 iPad Pro because, well, it's not a Mac. More specifically, and perhaps fairly, they object to the fact that iPadOS isn't MacOS. And this gets repeated, seemingly everywhere, ad nauseam.

There are folks who appreciate the iPad and iPadOS as a tablet computing platform, but they aren't the dominant voices in the blogosphere.

I don't have to do any "work" on either a Mac or an iPad, so I don't really have a dog in this fight. I also don't need an M4 iPad Pro. But I can appreciate the frustration of those who are satisfied with the features of iPadOS as a tablet computing productivity platform. I can agree that the Mac-first (Make the Mac Great Again?) crowd don't "get it." They view the iPad with a perspective from their formative experience with computing technology.

Just as the CLI crowd sneered at the GUI people back in the day.

The old-school Mac users will seemingly never be satisfied until the iPad is a Mac without a keyboard with some touch features bolted on.

Also reminds me of Ric Ford and Macintouch back in the days when Mac OS X (that's what it was called) was replacing MacOS 9 (or System 7 for some of those guys), and the Aqua UI was an abomination to them. Even GUI nerds can bitch about changes to a GUI.

Which is to say nothing about all the folks at the DPReview micro four-thirds forum who supposedly like Olympus (now OM System) cameras, but know so much more about what products the manufacturer should be making, and keep repeating themselves over and over again.

Broken records. An anachronism. But one you'll find everywhere.

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What Is The Meaning of This?

09:28 Wednesday, 15 May 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 77.92°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 995

The reality of our present circumstances is seldom far from my awareness. It colors much of what I think about the future and the present. Maybe that's why I like reading history these days. It's a form of escape.

I don't feel depressed, by what I believe the future holds, but I am disappointed and I know that my children and grandchildren will face a vastly more challenging life than I did.

But perhaps all that is relative. My mother's life as a child was more challenging than her children's lives, and her parents' lives were similarly more challenging.

And my childrens' and grandchildrens' lives will merely be the first couple of generations in what is likely to be a long decline, if we're fortunate enough to avoid a precipitously violent one.

Modernity is ending.

In many ways, it reminds me of John Conway's game of Life. I used to play a version of it on my Apple II. You'd start out with a random, low density distribution of cells, and occasionally you'd get this explosive growth of cells and activity across the grid, only to watch it die down to a much lower density of cells at the end.

I think that's what humanity's experience with modernity will likely be. We're at the peak of that activity now. It won't last forever, or even very long.

It may explain the Great Filter, why we haven't encountered other intelligent species in our region of the galaxy. Civilizations develop technology and are propelled into overshoot and collapse, again and again, none surviving long enough to make their existence known to other civilizations.

And Conway's Life may be a reflection of the idea that we live in a simulation.

In any event, faced with the prospect of losing this civilization, many wonder "What is the point?"

I like that blog. It can feel depressing at first, but, yeah, the math is pretty clear.

Now, I don't believe he's necessarily correct on the issue of determinism and free will. I think there's something about consciousness that is non-deterministic. Much of it is, of course. It explains why so much of our behavior is simply habituated, a product of physics and the laws of thermodynamics. Nature expends only enough energy, never more. At least, not for long anyway.

But gravity is the weakest force in the universe, weaker even than irony.

But it holds the whole thing together.

I don't understand the nature of consciousness, but I've come to believe that there is more here than meets the eye. Whether that's a responsive universe, or some hacker running this simulation, I don't know. But I think there's a reality beneath this reality. Maybe "above"? These kinds of abstractions are perhaps unhelpful.

In any event, what is the point? Why are we here?

I recall how I felt when my marriage failed, itself a long process, relatively speaking; and my career as a naval officer, concurrently with my marriage. It felt like, "The end of the world."

It wasn't, of course. But it took a lot of therapy and personal reflection to figure that out.

One of the insights I think I gleaned during those days was that life is meaningless, we bring meaning to life.

We make meaning.

That requires action, and that action can be habituated or "deterministic," or it can be something else.

It can be a choice.

I also learned that the inner voice is an unreliable narrator. An emergent property of a habituated system. An idling loop.

So, be still. Now and then.

And don't get too caught up with the voice inside your head.

Finally, I learned that we are not here to "change the world."

The world is here so that we may learn to change ourselves.

So, what is the point of all this in the face of the collapse of civilization?

The point is that it was never about the external reality of "the world." It has always been about the interior reality of how we wish to be in the world.

We are here to do our best. To interrogate, as much as possible (It's not much, because who has the energy? See "determinism" above.) from time to time, is this the best we can do?

What is "the best"? Another worthwhile question.

Who do we choose to be in the world?

(Everything is contingent. We are in the world. It must shape who we choose to be. If we choose.)

Existence is the tension between binding opposites, being and nothingness. Existence to have any meaning, demands consciousness. An awareness of "something" beyond "nothingness" - being.

Being is the negation of nothingness. An affirmation. A cosmic, universal Yes. Which can only exist against the foundation of nothingness.

Consciousness, awareness of individual existence in a temporal dimension and the awareness of non-existence, of death, may bring about desire. Between "being" and "nothingness," perhaps consciousness desires being over nothingness.

Perhaps desire emerges from a metaphysical tension between binding opposites, faith and fear. Faith affirms, embraces, accepts. Fear denies, retreats and rejects.

The point of our existence is to navigate our timestream, our "lifeline" between being and nothingness, faith and fear.

It's to do our best, and the rest is not up to us.

Faith and fear.

Love is faith in action. The first derivative of faith.

Courage is love in action. The second derivative of faith. Acceleration, an element of force.

Anger is fear in action.

Hate is anger in action. A second derivative of fear. Acceleration, an element of force.

Anyway, we're all in this together. Nobody is getting out of here alive.

Let's do our best, as best we can, and don't worry about the results, except insofar as they may help inform what "our best" might have been, so perhaps we can do better going forward.

As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.

A broken record, I know.

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Moving On

06:40 Thursday, 15 May 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 66.65°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 6.17mph
Words: 511

In recent days there have been more than a few moments when I wondered if we were making a mistake. I suppose that's normal. I've been looking at the cameras at Winterfell, and checking the weather from the little station I have set up, and it's been wet and gray for the most part. Not especially cold, but not warm either. It's been beautiful here.

But then I read things like this, and I feel as though we can't get out of here fast enough. The present reality is such that reason and logic have abandoned the field, leaving chaos and malfeasance to hold sway. It's a national problem, but at least it's being contested in the courts at the federal level. Whether or not reason prevails remains very much an open question. In Florida it's endemic, deeply rooted and just "business as usual."

I don't know, and I hate to think about, what scale of disaster it would take to make the citizens of Florida realize that they've been hoodwinked and swindled. Thus far, they've exhibited a very high tolerance for incompetence and demagoguery. Indeed, I think most Floridians mistake them for skill and leadership.

Our showing went well. The buyers are reportedly interested, though there are one or two other properties in the mix. We are supposed to know something tomorrow. I'm not especially optimistic, but they did want to know if we could be out of the house in 30 days. (Yes!)

Weirdly, our next-door neighbors are supposedly interested. I don't think they're serious, and it may just be a reflection of their rather odd nature anyway. But I gave the husband a tour of the house yesterday and tried to explain the solar system. I was inclined to blow them off, but you never know.

We're still sorting and packing and getting rid of stuff. We're supposed to rent another small storage unit today and re-shuffle everything. All the 11"x17" boxes will go into the smaller unit, densely packed. Smaller, lightweight items can go on top. That should leave enough space in the larger unit for the furniture Mitzi wants to keep.

She's off for New Mexico tomorrow, and I'm headed north on Saturday. I'll do a long day on Saturday, stopping in Quantico overnight. Should be an easy day Sunday, with an early start putting me into Winterfell by mid-day. Meeting with a water treatment company on Wednesday. I've got a few other chores while I'm up there, mainly to paint the interior of the garage (it's all OSB), and add another overhead light. But mainly it's to get me out of this house, and into a different frame of mind.

She'll be back in Florida a week before me, but we'll both be here for the first 10 days of June for some family get-togethers, semi-goodbyes and loading up whatever means of transport she decides for items going north, chiefly the refrigerator, which has made the question of what I have to take in the truck a lot simpler.

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Now With Reduced Bandwidth!

06:07 Friday, 15 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 44.44°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 7.43mph
Words: 936

I spent the last few days at what my friends and I call a "Beer Summit." This was the third such gathering in the past several years, the most recent one before this one was three years ago, which was the first one I attended.

We had more guys last time, just four of us this time. We get together at an RV and cabin campground in Barnesville, PA. Last time I was there I contracted Lyme disease (not at the campground, probably during a hike at a state park).

I made an error when I was reviewing my route choices from Apple Maps. I thought I was selecting the same route that brought me to Barnesville. It avoided Route 81 and kept me on mostly divided highways. But apparently my fat fingertip selected the "shortest" route, which, to my dismay, kept me on back country roads for the entire route.

It might have been a pleasant drive, except for the state of my bladder about 90 minutes into it. I was in a wooded area with no real shoulder on the road, with a 55mph speed limit. I asked Siri to find me a gas station, she told me to find a cell connection. Sometime after I passed the highest point on my route, 2490 feet according to the sign I passed, I spotted a kind of turnout not far up ahead. As luck, or lack thereof, would have it, there was a car right on my bumper. I signaled and braked hard, he or she swerved to pass me and I pulled off onto the dirt.

I wasn't going to wade into the weeds to go find a tree, conscious as I am of ticks, so I stood there next to the truck and relieved myself. No cars passed for what felt like interminable minutes. Comfort restored, I resumed my journey. I was still cursing myself for picking the wrong route.

All three routes were about the same amount of time, three hours and a few minutes. The shortest route must have been significantly shorter, because much of it was in towns and villages with speed limits of 25, 35 and 40 mph. (None of which were in the section of the route where my bladder began to complain.) The benefit, though, was the fuel economy. When I got home and shut off the truck, it reported 46mpg! That was since the stop to pee, which was shortly after passing the highest point on the route. So presumably it was all downhill from there as well. I didn't note the fuel economy when I stopped the first time because I had other things on my mind. That was presumably all uphill, so that fuel economy was likely not as impressive.

When I got home there were two excavators and a bulldozer in the yard. Not long after that, Brad arrived with a dump truck and a load of stone he was placing in a French drain he'd extended. He mentioned that his partner with the shale pit would be arriving soon, and they'd begin building the driveway.

We'd altered the route of the driveway to allow for a more gradual approach. Brad had spoken with a guy who drives one of those cement pump trucks and he took a look at the proposed driveway and said it wouldn't work. So we're routing it around and behind the garage and taking a wider, less steep approach.

Not long after they began removing the soil, the internet went out. Brad thought the fiber went under the driveway farther back. It was only buried about six inches deep anyway. They're supposed to be out here sometime today to fix it.

While we were in Barnesville, we watched the plebes climb Herndon Monument in a ceremony that's been taking place since 1950 on YouTube. I was using my laptop, linked to my phone's wifi hotspot. So I managed to use all of my hotspot data in Barnesville. Awesome. I'm running on about 500kbps "reduced bandwidth" now. Good enough for text, I guess.

On the drive down and back, I listened to a couple of podcasts about hydronic heating and cooling, and I'm now persuaded it's really the best solution for maintaining comfort in the house. It's pretty much standard practice in much of Europe, and though it was invented in America, it's hardly used here in residential construction anymore.

The epiphany was decoupling. I'm not an expert (yet), but the use of a buffer tank, allows you to make your hot or cold water when it's most efficient (least costly), store it, and then use it when it's required. This is ideal for people with time of use pricing, and for people with rooftop (or yard mounted) solar arrays. Even without those considerations, you can simply cool or heat the water during the time of day when it's most efficient to do so based on the outdoor temperature.

Similarly, moving heat is more efficient with small circulator pumps rather than large fans.

And then there are the climate implications, as current refrigerants have three orders of magnitude global warming potential over CO2. A mono block air to water heat pump uses a fraction of the refrigerant that a mini-split uses, which must pump refrigerant long distances into the house.

It does come at a price premium, partly because we lack the economies of scale in America with few qualified installers.

I told I was back onboard with Team Radiant, and he's excited. Now I just have to figure out how to do this without busting the budget.

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