This Morning at the Pond

22:51 Monday, 10 March 2014
Words: 369

The time change is interesting. We didn't run this morning because I didn't feel like getting up at what would feel like 4:00 a.m. We'll go Wednesday, when it'll feel, well, different. So I slept "late" and got up and the sun was just up. The light wasn't great at the back pond, but there were some visitors.

An Egret:

A Cormorant:

A bit of a surprise, a Kingfisher. Noisy bird too. As Bodhi and I prepared to leave, he began screeching and dove out of the tree toward the pond. As I stopped and turned back, he flew back up into the pine and remained there, apparently waiting for Bodhi and I to leave.

Later, as we came around from our walk, I stopped by the back pond again and noticed a Snowy Egret. The Egret and the Cormorant were still there too. No sign of the Kingfisher. I tried to get close to the Snowy Egret, but Golden Retrievers are not especially known for their stealth.

And so, the inevitable happened...

A nice morning for birds.

Deconstructing God

23:43 Monday, 10 March 2014
Words: 630

This is a wonderful interview in the New York Times.

One of the regrettable aspects of human existence is our propensity to make distinctions, as I am doing here. (See: Irony, Fifth Fundamental Force of the Universe.) These distinctions are sometimes useful, but too often they are meaningless and lead to misunderstanding, disagreement, violence and suffering. I would offer that a more correct assertion of my first sentence is that of all aspects of human existence, none is truly regrettable unless we're saying that human existence is as well. And there may be a case for that. But that wouldn't help point you in the direction (yet another distinction) I'd like you to see. So let's tiptoe through the minefield a bit and see how far we can go.

Many of the people I follow on Twitter are educated people, and their education has inculcated in them a set of what they believe are "rational" beliefs. Based on their confidence in their rational beliefs, they are often eager to mock or ridicule the beliefs of others that they regard as "irrational." Chiefly, these involve mockery of religion or people's expression of religious beliefs, and in general they mock two aspects of religion, the specific beliefs, and the contradictions between the tenets of a religion ("Love thy neighbor.") and the conduct of religious people (war and persecution).

The beliefs are mocked because they are not derived from what they perceive as a superior source, rigorous intellectual inquiry requiring repeatable observations and evidence (science). Religious belief is regarded as being a form of "received wisdom" from prophets or other figures of authority. Many are unaware, and worse, uninterested, in the kinds of rigorous intellectual inquiry that often takes place within a given religious tradition. They dispense with the requirement to make any such inquiry on their part because they reject a fundamental premise of many religions, the existence of God.

Now, I have some sympathy for this. I haven't spent a great deal of time looking into things like Scientology or astrology, because I think they're fundamentally whack. (Again, a distinction. But one must make some distinctions, if only to choose how to spend one's time. In my defense, I don't often spend much time mocking Scientology or astrology. I'm a Gemini, by the way.) I'm not sure it's fair to dismiss thousands of years of religious thought and practice with quite the same prejudice. Yet, this fundamental contradiction between their behavior, and the purported basis of the superiority of their theory of knowledge often seems to elude them; though contradictions in religious thought and conduct are perceived in bold relief.

It's human nature. We like to feel good about ourselves. Which often means making distinctions between ourselves and others. Pot, meet kettle.

Anyway, I enjoyed the interview because John Caputo seems to be discussing my own views with respect to faith.

I think that both "religious" people and "rational" people have a great deal in common, and really little basis for making the kinds of distinctions that either feels justifies mocking the other.

Worse, though, I'm afraid that supreme confidence in one's chosen, cherished set of beliefs precludes a deeper inquiry into the matter of faith. I think that happens out of fear, which is the binding opposite of faith. Fear causes us to cling to some sense of certainty, else we're ungrounded, lost, adrift in a world that seems to make little sense without some rigid belief system to orient ourselves within it.

It kind of works, but we can see the problems all around us. And mostly all we do is make marginal changes. But I guess that's okay. Some day it won't work, and either we'll make ourselves extinct, or perhaps we'll begin to do the real work.

Yet more bugs...

10:04 Saturday, 10 March 2018
Words: 40

Okay, adding a new post to see if that stimulates the Agent to update.

No, it didn't. Because we failed to set Key Attribute HTMLDontExport to False (uncheck the damn box!).

Looks like things may be working. Try an export...

Oh! Hi there!

10:08 Saturday, 10 March 2018
Words: 425

Well, I think I got this working. Time will tell.

For the past week or so, I've been doing a Facebook "fast." I popped in a couple of times to see what was going on, and found I wasn't really missing much. A couple of comments on a picture I posted, that was about it. I did experience a minor visceral reaction to the visual clutter in the page. There's too much stuff going on.

I really don't know how to correctly moderate my use of Facebook. The problems are many. One of them is too much stuff. A lot of the things I see, I really don't care about. I care about many of the people, but that kind of compels me to give attention to what they post. Some of what they post I do care about, but other things I don't care about at all. Some people post a LOT, some people don't post very often at all, and there's little correlation between the interest or quality of the posts and the frequency. The net effect is that there is too much "noise," and there aren't the kind of tools to tune that out.

I suspect everyone who uses Facebook on a daily basis struggles with the same issue.

I'm not going to leave FB. I am going to dial it back though. I deleted the FB app from my phone several months ago. I've used the browser version, which FB deliberately kind of hobbles to get you to install the app; but the upside is the unpleasantness of the experience tends to promote staying off it.

Instead, I'm going to try to focus my online "sharing" here. I can always post a link to this blog to Facebook from Safari. I'm also going to look into what's going on with RSS these days, and see if I can't find a decent reader app. Hopefully some of my old blogging friends that I've reconnected with on FB still blog with an RSS feed as well. I know Loren Webster and Garret Vreeland do.

There are likely things here that don't work. Dead links and so forth. I will be cleaning things up and moving things around in the days to come. I hope to make a regular practice of writing here. I know, I know, I've said that before. This time, maybe I mean it.

I've spent a couple of hours on my butt trying to get this thing working again. Now I need to go take a walk.

I'll be back.

Is this thing on?

10:34 Saturday, 10 March 2018
Words: 15

Test post. Trying to remember how this thing works...

Okay, main page agent isn't updating...

Trying to remember how to post pics...

19:58 Saturday, 10 March 2018

Current Wx: Temp: Pressure: Humidity: Wind:
Words: 9

Let's see if I can get this to work:

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Nothing to Shoot

08:55 Wednesday, 10 March 2021
Current Wx: Temp: Pressure: Humidity: Wind:
Words: 883

So I just dropped $129 on an out of print paperback. Why? Probably because I'm not very bright.

But I'm in a place that's familiar to me. One of discomfort and restlessness and frustration. It's kind of unpleasant, but I know it has value. I'm stuck and I can't stay here so I've got to move. This is me trying to figure my way out.

The book is It's Not About the f-Stop, by Jay Maisel. I've also got two other books sitting on the little table behind me. One is Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and the other is Betty Edwards' Drawing On The Right Side of The Brain.

So, something's gotta give. I'm gonna try and go make art. Who knows? Stranger things have happened, right?

Once, writing seemed to scratch this particular itch. Still does, but it's hard to write. I need to be alone, it needs to be quiet, and I need to feel as though I have something to say. These days, those things seldom align.

Which is probably why I spend so much time on twitter. 280 characters, how hard can it be? But it's unsatisfactory. I'll do a thread, when I really should be doing a post here. But then I have to be at the desk and then there's the dog, and the noise and endless other distractions.

It's Sunday. Schotzie's sleeping at my feet. Mitzi has gone to the store. There isn't a leaf-blower going. And I just spent $129 on an out of print paperback and I'm like "WTF are you doing, Rogers?"

But I know to pay attention, and this is where the universe has conspired to lead me. So here I am. I'm trying to see again.

I mean, I can see just fine, for a guy who's terribly near-sighted and has presbyopia and all that nonsense. But nothing I see inspires me. I don't like what I see.

I live in a brand-new gated community, an over-55 community. It's all beautiful and shiny and new and homogenous and boring. When I take a walk with the camera, everything looks like a real estate brochure. And it's suburbia. Although the houses are close together, it's all private property. When I lived at the condo, everything that wasn't inside your front door was "common property." The landscaping belonged to all of us. I could get right up close to the roses, the azaleas, the shrubs with the bugs and the little flowers. Here, all I can do is zoom in and capture a distant frame of a bunch of flowers. Distant. Not immediate, not intimate. Boring.

And this landscape has consumed, and is consuming, so much of Florida's natural landscape. And our interior landscape as well. We all seem to look alike, and, around here, far too many people seem to think alike. So nothing changes. Inertia.

So, I'm going to try Julia's exercises. I'm going to do the whole drawing program, try and liberate the right hemisphere of my brain. See if I can't "see" something different.

I was reading a post in the micro four thirds forum at DPReview about simulating Kodachrome 64 in Lightroom, which led me to some comments by Jay Maisel that you can read here. Which made me check Amazon to see if the book was still available. It's not, hence the price. But a little alarm was buzzing that said "Get that book!" Can't always trust that alarm, but this feels right. So, we'll see.

I don't know. I just can't sit around and watch nothing change. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. Maybe I'll make art, maybe I'll make change. Who knows? But I can't stay here, in this mental state. I've been buying a lot of gear, thinking it'd inspire me or change my perspective. (I've got the Oly 8mm f1.8 fisheye coming in tomorrow or Tuesday. Because I recently learned the E-M1x can defish that lens if I want it to.) But in the piece I linked to from Maisel, he mentions that he now (then?) shoots with one lens, a 28-300mm zoom. Well, the lens that I use the most is a 14-150 zoom, which in 35mm "equivalence" (don't go there), is 28-300mm. And my little Oly Stylus 1s has a 28-300mm effective focal length zoom on a tiny 1/1.7" sensor. So, that spoke to me as well, helped set off that alarm.

Well, an itch seems to have been scratched! And little pup is still asleep. Wonders never cease.

Apologies for not dropping by more often. I'm working on it. Just a lot more work to do, I think.

Be well. Got my first shot of Pfizer yesterday! May not die of COVID now. Or go on dialysis. So, things are looking up.

Pay attention.

(Editor's note: This was written last Sunday, which is when I discovered I no longer had FTP access to my web server. I upgraded the hosting earlier in the year with some big ideas I had, and then got distracted. Same old story.

Well, upgrading the hosting means a new server and a lot of logistical plumbing changes that I wasn't familiar with at the time. I'm a lot "smarter" now.)

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Time Travel

09:18 Sunday, 10 March 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 61.52°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 641

Too many ideas, too little time.

Or knowledge.

Wasted a lot of time this morning looking for something akin to a URL for calendar events, like there is for email. I think it's possible, but it's a lot more involved than I want to get into.

So I figured a simple contextual menu kind of thing where you select some text that looks like a date, do a keyboard shortcut and you go to that date in Calendar.

Well, there's almost something like that built into MacOS. When you select some text that looks like a date, 3/11/24, say...

Well, I just learned something else new! I moved the mouse over that text and got the data-detector dotted rectangle. The example date I chose had no events and I wanted to see what a date that had events looked like. I edited the date to a day I know has events, and now the data detector doesn't work. Weird.

But, what I was going to point out before I got dazzled and then disappointed by MacOS, is that the contextual menu invoked when you select that text has an entry to... OY!

I just went up to select that text just to make sure I wrote the menu item from the contextual menu correctly, and I got the data detector rectangle, this time just around 3/11, not 3/11/24! WTF, Apple??? Maybe it takes a few seconds? I don't know.

So when I edited the previous date, it appeared as though data detector would no longer "work." After writing some more text, going back to it "detected" 3/11 and gave me a look at that date and the option to create an event. When I wrote "3/11/24" in the paragraph above, I got the data detector rectangle around the whole date again. (And it works with the quotation marks around it.) And the "3/11" immediately following "detected" works too.

June 17 2024 13:30

Let's see what happens with the date above, which was the date I was "practicing" with before.

Yep, data detector works. Oddly, it doesn't work in TextEdit, which was where I was experimenting. Fortunately, I don't do much work in TextEdit. Just tried it in BBEdit and it doesn't work there either. Don't even get the "standard" contextual menu. Probably a setting in BBEdit prefs I have to enable, I haven't looked.

Anyway...

If you don't get a data detector indication, you can select a date and control-click or right-click, and get a contextual menu item to "Show This Date in Calendar..." Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't work in TextEdit, don't know why. Doesn't work at all in BBEdit. Weird.

You can also go to System Preferences->Accessibility->Motor->Alternate Control Methods->Alternate Pointer Actions and set something like F12 equal to right-click, invoking the contextual menu without touching the mouse or trackpad.

The idea, one of too many, was to be able to be in the log on the phone with someone you need to schedule something with, and have a quick way to get to the calendar for that date to see if you're free.

I didn't know (or had forgotten) that data detectors had that functionality and were enabled by default in Tinderbox.

So, yay! Now you know, and I've saved you a couple of hours out of your life.

So even though it seems like it's hard to get a simple URL to a calendar event, MacOS will let you view your calendar for that day in Tinderbox, which is cooler than switching to Calendar. Solid win. If you do want to go to Calendar, just double click in the popover window. It will create a new entry when you go to Calendar though, so you'll have to delete that blank entry.

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Not Much

11:09 Monday, 10 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 68.97°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 169

I wrote to all of my elected representatives this morning. The topic was about DOGE and the needless and cruel stress and anxiety it was causing hardworking Americans in households all across our country. I specifically addressed the case of my brother, a disabled Gulf War veteran and civil servant.

I closed with this:

I don't expect any action from you. I just wish to use my voice to tell you, in no uncertain terms, that this is wrong and I strenuously object to it. This is being done without my consent as a voter, over my objections as a citizen, and with my utter contempt as a retired naval officer and veteran.

I don't have any illusions that anything I could write would persuade them to do something. I just wanted it on record that it was wrong, that I did not consent, I objected and I found it contemptible.

I think I'm going to keep repeating that message every day.

It's not much, but it's not silence.

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Kevin Drum

12:05 Monday, 10 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 70.59°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 20

Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7th.

He was interesting, informative, reasonable and rational.

His voice will be missed.

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Purity

08:33 Tuesday, 10 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 49.71°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 7.65mph
Words: 584

I should be in the gym right now, on the elliptical machine, but I'm here because I can't seem to sleep "normally." Always with this wake up around 0200, lie awake until around 0400, then finally fall asleep and wake up after 0700.

And what do I do while I'm lying awake, I check the RSS feeds.

Ian Betteridge wrote a very long post called Zen fascists will control you... I read it. Should you read it? I don't know. Seems like a lot of work for little gain, but if you like the kind of game he plays in the piece, you might find it entertaining.

To get this out of the way, "the game," is to make reference to a lot of cultural events, popular figures, popular cultural movements, and then draw a through-line to the present, which supposedly points to the source of all our problems. That may be just a little unfair, but only a little.

(Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't make reference to Pure Land Buddhism, since he opened with Zen fascists.)

The piece did not help me fall asleep, mostly because I didn't agree with the "logic." While I was somewhat in sympathy with the notional thesis, which is that the "politics of purity" is dangerous. And his "logic" throws a lot of things that are decidedly not dangerous under the bus.

Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It's how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you've made a wrong turn.

What is the counterculture today? Didn't we just talked about this? To the extent that a "counterculture" exists at all, it mostly seems to exist online, with influencers competing with one another for attention. I don't think it's an identifiable group; and its "purity" tenets, insofar as they may exist, seem transient at reasonable timescales.

And I really think the whole "purity" construction is problematic for the thesis he's trying to support. I think he uses "purity" because it's more emotionally evocative than a word like "ideal," which is, I think, the real notion he's placing under indictment.

None of what he describes in the piece is new. All of it is rooted in human behavior, human weakness. It's been happening since we've had the cognitive surplus to conceive of "ideals" and the resource surpluses to try to achieve them.

"There's a sucker born every minute."

Zealots, ideologues, fanatics, fetishists, many of them are harmless. Some of them are frauds, charlatans, con artists. They promote an ideal, not to achieve it, but to use it to separate you from your money. Or your vote.

And true believers can be problematic sometimes. Mostly they're harmless, like the "plain text" fetishists.

We are stardust, we are golden. This is the counterculture's central claim about human nature, compressed into eight words.

Dude, seriously? Why do you have to drag Joni Mitchell into this? (That was the first thing that pissed me off.) And that's six words.

Count much?

Anyway, I'm boring myself at this point.

The notion of the "ideal" is a fantasy. Everything exists in contingent connection. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something. It doesn't require an exercise in pop-culture critique or populist politics to figure that out.

And leave Joni Mitchell out of this!

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One More Thing...

09:33 Tuesday, 10 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 54.45°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 54% Wind: 8.21mph
Words: 226

Something had been gnawing at me for the last week or so since I saw this post from Jack Baty.

My views have never totally aligned with Ben Thompson’s, and his latest Stratechery piece reinforced that.

That piece is here.

Here's the bit that pissed me off:

What is important to note is that the entire debate is ultimately pointless: the very concept of “international law” is fake, not because pertinent statutes and agreements don’t exist, but because their effectiveness is ultimately rooted in their enforceability. That, by extension, means there must be an entity to enact such enforcement, with the capability to match, and such an entity does not exist.

Bullshit.

And I'm surprised and disappointed that it's taken me this long to figure out why I knew it was bullshit.

The concept of "international law" is not fake. Its "effectiveness" is not ultimately rooted in its enforceability.

It exists so that we can know who is a criminal.

What we do with that knowledge is up to us.

To put it another way, if, after this weekend, you want to hold onto the concept of International Law, then realize the debate has been resolved: Iran was in violation, because their military just had its clock cleaned by the U.S., which means the U.S. decides who is right and who is wrong.

Bullshit.

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