I made a brief post the other day about the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind, and I wanted to mention something that struck me about Kevin Bacon's character, who was supposedly a kind of "prepper."

Why didn't he know what was going on? Because anyone who understands our modern communications system, dependent on computers and networks, knows that a good shortwave or "world band" radio is what you need to stay informed. AM ("medium wave") has good propagation characteristics, but the consolidated network of broadcast stations likely rely on computers and the internet to get their information.

So you'd want a radio that has the ability to receive single sideband (SSB) modulation. Then you'd be able to listen to all the hams, and get a variety of first-hand reports of what they were seeing and experiencing.

And many of these radios include the air bands, so you could listen in to the air traffic and perhaps get some insight into why planes were falling from the sky.

C. Crane, Eton and Sangean all make a good, small, battery powered radio that can receive these frequencies and decode SSB. The real nerds will want an SDR (software defined radio) that can decode many more modes. There are other manufacturers, like XHData, Tecsun and many others. Most are based on Silicon Labs chips, and they mostly vary by user interface, cabinet design, speaker size, batteries, antenna connections and so on. Performance is roughly similar, though the Sangean 909X2 can be somewhat quiet on SSB.

They all work well enough from the whip, but most include a small wire antenna you can use to improve reception.

Anyway, get a good radio. Just in case.

It's Christmas.

(N.B. These are not "affiliate links." I don't get anything if you buy a radio. I own each of them.)

Finished the first season of Halo, and I'm rather impressed. It's not great, but it's entertaining. The production values are pretty high, which I guess is to be expected when you've got Spielberg involved.

It's free on Prime until the end of the month, then you'll have to subscribe to Paramount+ to watch season 2. I don't know if that drops right at the beginning of the year, though I suppose I could look it up.

For once I'd like a hard sf series that didn't depend on interplanetary conflict with an emphasis on armed warships, people wearing powered armor, alien artifacts, etc, etc.

Lost In Space was kind of that series, but it never really clicked with me. For All Mankind is just getting tedious. It's too "on the nose," without being clever or funny like Upload is. But it's "serious," so I guess it can't be.

Almost Human, with Karl Urban from a decade ago was good. I was disappointed it didn't go on for a couple of seasons. Kind of an Alien Nation series without the aliens.

I'm looking forward to a post-apocalyptic series about the collapse of civilization. Flooded New York City or Miami. Fallout zones from limited nuclear exchanges. Regional warlords. Roving gangs. Highwaymen. Small communities trying to keep going, solving problems with food supplies, failing infrastructure, lack of industry, spare parts. All the things our grandchildren have to look forward to. Kind of like The Last of Us, only without the mushrooms.

That'd be a fun watch.

I subscribe to the Miami Herald, and they offer their stories via RSS, which I really appreciate.

Unfortunately, they also include "from our partners" posts, mostly sports betting and casinos. They also seem to have a large number of "lottery winner" stories, and "strange creature" stories.

I wish NetNewsWire offered a filter setting that allowed me to hide posts that contained certain keywords or phrases. It's pretty quick to just arrow down through the feed, but it just makes the experience of browsing the news less pleasant. Not that what remains is very "pleasant." They also cover a lot of out of state murders, "cold cases," child and adolescent deaths by accident. None of these things I regard as "news" for me.

Similarly, there are some very high-attention earning bloggers I get tired of reading. So I unsubscribe or unfollow, but because they're such high attention-earners, other people I follow may quote them. In the quotations, I see the same tired rhetoric I saw that caused me to unfollow them. Not to be all mysterious, it's John Gruber.

I wish I could filter any post that contained "Gruber."

It's not that I can't stand him, or hate his writing or anything. I'm just so very tired of it.

It's to the point where I can anticipate pretty much anything he's going to write on any given topic, and it never adds anything to my understanding of a particular issue. I know what his point of view is, it never varies, there's little to "surprise and delight" me. I wonder if he feels somehow trapped by his audience and his need to maintain his readership in order to attract sponsors.

In any event, I unfollowed and unsubscribed, and his writing still pops up in my feeds.

Rob, if you're looking for a feature to add to Stream...

(And I just noticed your screenshots. Oy!)

The cool thing about the marmot is that if you unsubscribe or unfollow, you're pretty much guaranteed to be untroubled by its existence.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:27 Saturday, 16 December 2023

I stumbled upon flickriver for the first time today, despite the fact that it's been around since 2007!

It has a little facility that allows you to create a "badge" with tiny thumbnails that takes you to my flickr account. The one I created initially was for my most "interesting" photos, presumably as determined by the number of "favorites" they received. Since I've only recently been actively posting and curating to flickr, most of my "interesting" photos are from a long time ago, and may not be genuinely interesting.

I'll probably replace it with this one, which offers tiny thumbnails of my most recent public photos:

<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2023/Images/IMG_2218.JPG" alt=“The opposite of crepuscular rays, these “sunbeams” appear to converge away from the sun, over a suburban streetscape.">

It's cloudy and windy here again today. I didn't have a new photo to send to Mom, so I looked back "on this day" a couple of years ago. This is actually from December 15, 2021.

I wanted to make sure I spelled "crepuscular" correctly, and I discovered that these are actually "anti-crepuscular" rays. The beams of light appear to converge opposite from the sun.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:55 Thursday, 14 December 2023

Experimental test. Should wind up on the Sights page.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:09 Thursday, 14 December 2023

I read Chapter 4 in The Notebook, by Roland Allen, yesterday and it was fascinating. The preceding chapters were great too, but the explosion of "note-taking" in Florence (and seemingly only Florence) in the 14th and 15th centuries was amazing. All because of paper. (I'm through Chapter 5, which is also fascinating, but 4 is amazing.)

Zibaldoni is one of the three genres of notebooks in the chapter called, Ricordi, Ricordanzi, Zibaldoni. It's kind of like an "everything box," recording things like lists, quotations, recipes, events, drawings, devotions, expenses, well, everything.

It's kind of like what I use Apple Notes for these days.

We know a lot about Florentine Italy because of these notetakers and their notebooks, because so many of them have survived. (Allen refers to them as "survivals," which seems odd to me. Why not "survivors?" Perhaps it's an academic use?)

In any event, apart from two regional collapses since the Industrial Revolution (The World Wars, which spared North America, a huge reservoir of wealth and resources.) Western civilization has continued in an unbroken line since the Renaissance. It's very unclear, perhaps unlikely, that it will continue to do so. So I wonder what future historians, centuries hence, might infer about our note taking practices, so many of which occur in media probably less durable and definitely less accessible than paper.

The book is exciting and inspiring in many ways, and I still have a large number of blank notebooks, despite giving what was probably an equal number of other blank notebooks away to Goodwill earlier this year. It would require a significant re-think of my "personal space," my "office," which is profoundly oriented around this 27" iMac, the Canon Pro 100 printer, my cameras, lenses and books.

When I write a card to Mom, I shove my keyboard under the shelf that lifts the iMac to a more ergonomic height. But I usually have to move batteries, chargers, a camera, AirPods, calculators and other assorted crap to have room to shove it under! Do I have room for a small writing desk in here?

Probably not, but...

Maybe?

I enjoyed this Netflix movie. Mitzi did not. She found it too slow, and the ending disappointing.

It was kind of a long episode of the Twilight Zone, a contemporary, expanded take on The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. (Which I always recall as "When the Monsters Come Out on Maple Street." Glad I checked.)

I wish I spoke Spanish. What was that woman going on about?

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:58 Wednesday, 13 December 2023

Amazon Prime is offering a Paramount+ series, Halo, until the end of December. I've binged the first six or seven episodes, and I'm surprised to find that it's better than I expected. It's not as good as The Expanse, but it's not bad.

I won't subscribe to Paramount+ to watch Season 2, but it's an entertaining diversion for the time being.

The marmot will continue to compartmentalize its existential dread and offer routine posts of uncertain quality, with the occasional interruption of hysterical screaming.

Carry on.

After posting yesterday, I stumbled on this piece in The New Republic. I think Chris Murphy and David Brooks would enjoy dinner together, I think they have much they in common.

Brooks can be tedious and insufferable, Murphy comes close. But I think Murphy's "four sources of our unease" is about on target, and largely congruent with Brooks' views:

These include: a loss of control over economic and family life; an acute loneliness and disconnection from community; a frustration with the pace and nature of technological change; and an exhaustion with suffocating consumerism. The result is a dangerous lack of meaning or positive identity for tens of millions of Americans—a spiritual emptiness—that leaves us casting about for outlets for our anxiety and anger.

It's a long piece, but it's worth skimming over, I think. I don't know if there's any chance we can get a "third way" political movement in America. I'm not optimistic.

This idea of loneliness keeps recurring:

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …

– From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt

Arendt and Hoffer (The True Believer) both published in 1951. Of the two books, Hoffer's is easier to read and was a popular book among more general audiences. I think it was likely also wrong in many ways.

Hoffer embraces a kind of uniquely American notion of "rugged individualism." Itself, a romantic myth that hasn't served us well.

But that's not what this post is about.

I think the "four sources" are symptoms rather than root causes. And I think the root causes are the more fundamental beliefs that underly this civilization.

One is that man is above nature. We're supposedly created in God's image, and that God was "made man" in order to save humanity from its inherent nature. At least, in one religious tradition.

Another is that material and economic progress are inherently "good." This might be true if we had a complete understanding of the implications of what we view as "progress." Much of our present crisis is due to ignorance, or at least ignoring the implications of material progress.

Also included is capitalism, which is an article of faith so deeply rooted in my culture that it's radical heresy to question it, and heretics should be burned at the stake! (Rhetorically at least.)

Finally, I have to believe that "competition" as a central organizing principle of our culture and civilization has been more bane than benefit. We have lost sight of the value of cooperation, and we view far too many questions through a zero-sum lens.

These are fundamental beliefs, core values, and they're either wrong, or misunderstood. In either event, they have brought us to the present crisis.

I don't know that we have the time to make the kinds of radical change necessary to arrest the unfolding catastrophe. But if we can at least understand how we went wrong, and can record that in a way that survives, perhaps the next civilization might avoid our mistakes.

That would be progress.

"Release the kraken!"

I read Rachel Martin's interview with Rick Rubin a couple of days ago, and immediately ordered the book (The Creative Act: A Way of Being). It's scheduled to arrive today. I see Jack Baty is already reading it.

I'm also reading The Notebook A History of Thinking On Paper, along with A Book of One's Own People and Their Diaries. To those, add Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, by John Gray; Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philospher, by Tom Bethell; Hoffer's The True Believer; and Neil Postman's Technopoly is in the active pile as well.

I shouldn't leave out Two Navies Divided, by Brian Laverly a history of the British and American navies in WW II. That one got a little sidetracked by this "tools for thought" distraction.

I don't know. I've started The Artist's Way more than a couple of times. I did morning pages for a while, until my crowded desk, disgust with my handwriting and the inability to stick with anything for very long, kind of let that slip away. My handwriting is slightly better, well, much better, since I've been writing cards to my mom. My biggest problem is my brain gets ahead of my hand, and I'm thinking about what I'm going to write next rather than focusing on my handwriting. As soon as that happens, it deteriorates. If I can keep my focus on my handwriting, it's pretty legible and almost not embarrassing.

There's a kind of cognitive dissonance constantly going on in my head, as I seem to be watching the death of American democracy, the opening stages of the collapse of this civilization. and the profoundly stupefying inability of supposedly "rational" human beings to do anything about it, carrying on as if none of it was happening or even cheering it on.

I don't know that if I read enough books, or parts of enough books, I'll be able to achieve a sort of spiritual non-attachment to the unfolding catastrophe, but it does pass the time.

There seems to be an unresolved tension in how humanity views itself in modernity. Apparently the individual, especially the rights of the individual have been elevated above, what? The masses? We seem to have all embraced Invictus, masters of our fates and captains of our souls. While simultaneously running the ship of civilization aground despite all the charts and aids to navigation available to us that we are perversely hell-bent on ignoring.

Hoffer regards followers of mass movements as weak individuals, unable to accommodate themselves to the demands of freedom. But human beings are social animals, and we associate ourselves in groups, social organisms of various sizes and scales, belonging to more than one at any given time. "No man is an island." We need to be among other people. We should spend more time thinking about the kinds of people with whom we wish to associate.

I'd say that our understanding of freedom is incomplete at best, and utterly wrong at worst. We lack the cognitive capacity, to say nothing of sufficiently reliable information, to act as completely independent, "rational" agents at all times. We rely on habits and customs to get through our daily activities. We take cues, consciously or unconsciously, from the people around us.

I think Rheingold's artless construction, "smart mobs," implicitly recognizes the liberation an individual experiences being part of a mob, redeeming its inherent and terrifying thoughtlessness through technology, rendering them "smart." We worship our technology as the means of our redemption. And our technology is never as good as we wish to believe it is. It's the defining delusion of modernity.

We have lost the plot, and I fear there is little hope of regaining it.

But I think we have to try. I don't know if anything I'm doing helps in any way. Perhaps it's best to "Don't just do something! Stand there." Unconventional strategies and so on.

Anyway, sorry to be a buzzkill in this "season of joy." Was trying to think of something to blog about and this came to mind. So I gave myself permission to post it.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:40 Tuesday, 12 December 2023

After getting the MX-1 and another XZ-2, I started pulling cameras out of the box I was going to sell to KEH. I pulled out the Panasonic Lumix LX7, a red (so red) E-PL6, my old E-PL7 and the relatively new E-PL10. That's all the cameras. Still a bunch of lenses and grips and stuff in there. Probably should figure out what to do with all that pretty soon.

Anyway, it's been fun shooting with them a little bit. Having not used them in months, it's like having a new camera again, which is a fun experience. They all have their little quirks. The feel of the grip, the sound of the shutter, the way the LCD flips (or doesn't).

People emotionally invested in the iPhone, and Apple the corporation, enjoy extolling the virtues of the iPhone camera(s). After the cpu, the camera is the biggest new feature of any new phone. And why not? A phone is boring. It makes calls. It receives texts. Boring!

But a camera can make art.

And people do make art with their phones.

But they're phones. Phones that have little camera sensors and lenses built in that are put there to sell more phones.

When I shoot with my phone, it's because I don't have a camera with me. And mostly it's to document something I need to remember. Or to blow up some text that's impossible for me to read otherwise.

Apple's been adding more cameras to their phones to offer additional focal lengths because you can't make an interchangeable lens phone, and you can't graft a power zoom onto one and still stuff it in your pocket.

Just press your greasy finger on a fake button on a screen and a computer makes a noise that supposedly sounds like a shutter and takes a bunch of data from one of those sensors and puts together something that some programmer thought would be a pleasing image for you. And most of the time, it's fine. Maybe even great.

And for a lot of people, that's the only camera experience they're ever going to know.

I know I don't care for the way my iPhone images look. They don't look like photos. It's kind of like when I watch movies in that super-smooth 120fps, HDR mode that always looks like some weird video thing rather than a movie (24fps, thank you very much). For the record, the best iPhone camera in terms of the images it produced, was the iPhone 7. After that, they all started looking weird.

I know this makes me sound like an old fart, and that's fine because I am an old fart. Kids are shooting film now, I think, not because it's "cool," but because you get to experience making something.

That's what makes it "cool." It's an experience, not some sterile electronic, algorithmic data manipulation performed in "machine learning" units.

Now, film is too much work and too expensive for me. I'm old enough to appreciate digital. But I think all the folks shooting film these days understand that a phone is not a camera. Which is heresy to all the Apple apostles.

I love how the sound of the shutter is different on nearly each of the cameras I own. (The compacts all have leaf shutters, which pretty much all sound alike. Nearly silent.)

The only shutter sound I recall not liking was the E-PM1, Olympus PEN mini (first version, 12MP sensor). It was a racket that sounded like it might destroy itself. But I did love the images it made. People used to bitch about "shutter shock," and I did notice it from time to time. You'd get kind of a double-image, motion blur thing in the vertical axis; but it didn't happen often enough to be a big deal to me.

But there's a whole tactile experience that comes with holding a camera (trying to hold it steady, though image stabilization has largely made that a non-issue these days), dialing in some exposure compensation, or program shift, or changing the aperture of the lens, pressing a real button (Yeah, it's an electronic switch, not a mechanical trigger anymore.) and hearing and feeling the shutter make the exposure. (I'm not a fan of electronic shutters, though they have their place.)

That's the experience of using a camera, not a phone. A device designed and intended to produce images. Nothing else. Whether you call it "making a photo" or "taking a picture," it's you and the device intended for that purpose, engaging in a process, a kind of communion, with the device and the scene and your eye.

Now excuse me but, get off my damn lawn!

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:53 Sunday, 10 December 2023

I started a post yesterday, but didn't finish it. I don't wish to return to it just now, I don't want to publish it, but I don't want to throw it away either.

Fortunately, there's the "HTMLDontExport" attribute. Normally, it's a final sanity check for me, I have to uncheck the box to export and that serves as a final prompt to consider if I want to put this "out there." It was more important back in the day when I was somewhat more intemperate or vituperative. These days, I pretty much talk myself out of writing those posts before I sit down at the computer.

So it'll stay here in the marmot, and maybe I'll return to it one day.

Oddly enough, it has only just occurred to me now that I can use that facility to make the marmot a repository for more intimate musings that I don't wish to share. I don't keep a journal, per se, the marmot is as close as it gets. And it's been useful in that way, though everything I've written here has been with at least the initial intention of sharing it publicly.

Perhaps that's a good thing though. I think about what I'm writing when I intend to post it. Do I want to write things that don't require that degree of effort? Do I want to really think when I'm writing for an audience of one?

Maybe I do.

I'll think about it.

(Funnily enough, the preceding unpublished post was titled "Don't Even Think About It.")

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:25 Sunday, 10 December 2023

It's the time of the year when we start getting cards from various friends and family. It's the only time we get actual mail from real people. I shouldn't say that. Mitzi gets thank you notes from people, because she does nice things.

Anyway, I've been trying to keep up with printing and mailing a photo greeting card to my mom every day (except Sunday) for quite some time now. I don't recall exactly when I started, but it's been several months anyway. I just ordered 300 60lb 10x7 glossy scored photo cards from Red River Paper, because I'd gone through the 60lb and 80lb boxes I already had on hand. (80lb is excessive. 60 is about the sweet spot.)

I got the idea that maybe I'd print some holiday cards and mail them to people I know. I have a box of "pano" cards I use, but I don't use them often. One of my neighbors has a holiday setup in front of his house with flamingos and a gator, typical Florida stuff. I figured I'd shoot that and use it for the card.

Wherein I've returned to another circle of hell.

Printing.

I'd already managed to create a document in Apple Pages that would print a pano card, and I figured I'd just use that.

Well, one thing led to another and I don't know where I went astray, but eventually I ended up with the dreaded, "The media type and paper size are not set correctly. Change the media type or paper size setting, and print again."

To make a long story short, I don't know exactly what resolved the problem because I tried a lot of things. But I think one of the key things was to start with a "page layout" blank document in Pages. Apparently, I was using "word processing." I also seem to have two drivers for the Canon 100 Pro printer, and one works for some cards and the other works for other cards. Don't ask me why.

Anyway, I created the card and did my first test print. Near the end of printing, I heard this mechanical sound I'd never heard before. When the card comes out, about the last ¾ of an inch of the image is slightly out of register with the remainder of the image. If you didn't know to look for it, you might not spot it. Or so Mitzi says.

I ran all the printer tests, alignments and so on, and all seems well. Tried again. Same thing.

Oy.

This printer is over seven years old, but it's worked reliably for the last several months when I've been printing with it nearly every day.

I just ran a couple of letter-sized prints through it, using some of the sample pages I got from Red River years ago. (Polar Gloss Metallic 255 68lb ULTRAPRO GLOSS 2.0), and I got a communications error on the borderless print ("Fill" in Photos), and the very last part of the image is kind of a gradient fade. The one with a small margin all around printed perfectly.

As an aside, I printed an image of the 1917 Miller Golden Submarine (a car), and that sure prints really nice on this paper. I'm kind of dazzled, actually.

Anyway, I think I may have a driver problem printing borderless. There were no weird mechanical noises on these larger prints. I was worried there was a worn tooth on a belt or gear.

I wasn't too thrilled with the photo I was using anyway. I'll have to see if I can't come up with something I like better, and maybe I'll just go with the 5x7 format.

On the other hand, I haven't sent holiday cards in decades, so why start now? Make myself crazy like this. Yeesh.

Jack Baty responds.

I agree with his criticism of the video. I concluded that the seemingly excessive references were part of the schtick, and 30 minutes is a lot to invest in a rather niche distraction. (I confess, I watched it at 1.5x speed, having only recently discovering that feature. Perhaps I should have disclosed that?)

As regards the EOS-1Ds, I say if your back can handle it, go for it! You're still a young man.

The foregoing being an example of the power of RSS!

Or something.

We watched Harvey last night. I loved the movie as a kid. I bought it a couple of years ago, perhaps out of nostalgia.

Watching it again last night, I was struck by a line that I recall I felt struck by a couple of years ago when I watched it for the first time after buying it.

<blockquote>Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.</blockquote>

It troubles me that I may be neither. While there's probably little I can do about the former, "tools for thought" notwithstanding, perhaps I could do something about the latter.

Something to think about.

Is Niklas Luhman remembered more for his contributions to his fields of study, or for his note-taking system? Are Niklas Luhman's written works more valuable, more enduring than his "zettelkasten"?

Did his note-taking method give him more insight, more knowledge? Or did it just make him more productive?

In our culture, do we value knowledge and insight, or productivity?

Do more people recall Luhman or Eric Hoffer? (Few people probably recall either. I knew of Hoffer long before I learned of Luhman.)

I don't know. I'm not even sure it's worth thinking about very much.

But we do so adore our tools.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:51 Wednesday, 6 December 2023

Jack Baty:

I can't decide if the recent trend of using old digicams is fun and nostalgic or just stupid.

I think it's "fun and nostalgic," and it's "stupid" if you're not having fun.

In the competition for attention that is the YouTube ecosystem (Where by "eco," one refers to "economy" or "economic," not "ecology."), there always has to be something that attracts eyeballs. One of the tried and true tactics is contrarianism, or the counter-intuitive. In a world where we are persuaded that we must always pursue "better" (often conceived as "more" (megapixels, frames per second, aperture) or "less" (noise, weight, size)), it's counter-intuitive to suggest that the "old and busted" can equal the new hotness.

Our restless quest to occupy our surplus of attention, defined by our deficit of cognition, we must seek the novel. So it oscillates between the new hotness, and affection for the underdog, the nostalgic, the trash that can equal the "artistic" prowess of expensive gear available to those with a surplus of cash to equal their surplus of attention, burdened as they are with the same deficit of cognition.

I humbly include myself in these plural pronouns. We all have much better things to do with our time, if only we could figure out what.

In any event, the XZ-2 has arrived and I am pleased. Yesterday I played with a Lumix LX7 I'd intended to sell, but now seem to desire.

I think digicams, particularly the "serious" ones from about 2010 on, are fun and useful. The older ones, with optical viewfinders that suffered badly from parallax, tiny LCDs useless for composition, and media that was slow and fragile (to include the pins on CF card connectors), can make the process of taking pictures less fun, unless you enjoy the challenge.

In any event, I really had a good laugh from this YouTube video. A cut above the average "gear" piece, with abundant references to philosophy and the academy and all our precious notions:

I don't know if it's because I mentioned it in the marmot, or if it's because I'm tagging photos now, but I've been getting more views on Flickr in the last few days.

I tried scrolling backward on the timeline, but they vary the scale on the y-axis so it's not immediately obvious when you're seeing a big uptick in views. Suffice to say, I've gone from single-digits of daily views to dozens; and this morning I've already had 123 views.

Yikes! I might start feeling a bit self-conscious.

Mitzi was watching some series on Netflix about Fran Liebowitz, and I watched a little of one episode. She was talking about talent, and she said some people have it and some people don't. She said something like, "Practice can make you better. It can't make you good." And she went on to say that it's all right to do things you enjoy, but if you don't have any talent for it, keep it to yourself. Don't share it.

Ouch!

Well, sorry lady.

I don't think I have any talent for anything. For one thing, I rush through everything. Meals. Writing blog posts. Taking pictures. I try to slow down, but that usually just means not doing anything at all.

To me, the marmot is just thinking out loud.

Like this morning. I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about yesterday's meetup. I figured I'd write about it in the marmot. I proofed it before I posted it, and then found a few typos after I posted it. Then I saw something that I thought was unclear and added a sentence that I'm not sure made any difference.

But, it was done. At some point, it's just done. It's not "deathless prose." It's a blog, and its' definitely "over it."

I take pictures of things that catch my eye. I edit them to make them "better," according to the standards I've absorbed spending (wasting?) time on photography websites or videos, and I upload them to Flickr. Sometimes I think they're cool. I mean, the moon has looked the same since forever, and I've established that I can get some fairly nice telephoto shots, why bother doing more? I really don't know. Sometimes they're just things that I thought were interesting.

Some of my neighbors like them.

Well, one of my neighbors anyway.

Something to do. Pass the time. Hopefully there's still some beauty in this broken world and maybe it's worth sharing some of it. Hopefully I can see it, and I'm not just adding to the noise.

Who knows?

Anyway, my pics are getting more views.

Cool.

I don't know the magnitude of the set of passions embraced by humanity. Certainly, a single human being can only embrace a tiny fraction of the universe of passions.

We are drawn to others who share our passions, and so it's possible to believe that "everyone" or "most people," or "society" share our passions, when it's really a very tiny fraction.

Conversely, it's possible to believe that we're special, because we are so few.

I say all this because as I was lying awake, thinking about this, I kept using the pronoun "we," but then it occurred to me that the vast majority of people don't know or care about what I was thinking about.

What I was thinking about was a current passion among some of us, "tools for thought."

And let me also add that it is only we, the privileged, who have the "cognitive surplus," who can indulge our passions. We're not fully engaged just trying to meet the requirements of survival, as many people are. Or trying to achieve something of whatever we believe the narrative arc of our life should be.

We have the time to "think" about "tools for thought."

I should stop using "we" and confine my "thoughts" to the first-person singular.

I don't think we understand what thought is, how it arises.

Existence precedes narrative.

This was my emotional reaction to Dr. David Weinberger's internet triumphalist declaration that "We are writing ourselves into existence."

I maintained we were painting ourselves into corners.

Existence preceded language, therefore "thought" precedes language. Language is an abstraction that makes the interior product of thought accessible to other minds. I can show someone how to chip flint to make an axe (If I knew how to chip flint to make an axe.). I can show someone how to make fire.

More complicated ideas require abstractions and language was probably the first "tool for thought."

Except it wasn't necessarily for thought, because thinking can occur below the level of language. Language imperfectly reifies thought, and allows it to be shared, again, imperfectly.

"You don't know what I mean."

I was educated as an engineer. I have had a lifelong interest in technology, especially the advance of technology. Why was this? Was it because as a child I watched television and I saw moving images of airplanes set to thrilling music?

"From out of the blue of a western sky comes a new breed of lawman, Sky King!"

In the early hours of the morning, before I had to go to school, a Detroit TV station broadcast a cartoon called Space Angel. Later I watched Jonny Quest in prime time. (Checking to see if I was recalling this correctly, I learned that Space Angel and Jonny Quest both came from the same artist. I did not know that. Or, if I did, I'd forgotten. Makes sense though. He liked big fins on his air and space craft.)

Did television imbue in me an emotional response that stirred an interest in technology? Jonny Quest appeared in 1964, when I was seven. I was a mediocre student in elementary school, as I would later be a mediocre student at the Naval Academy. But in the sixth grade Mrs. Lupica, our librarian at Peterboro Street Elementary School, introduced me to Robert Heinlein with Have Spacesuit — Will Travel. (She'd previously convinced me to read a book called Henry 3, about which I recall little except it was about a lonely boy and perhaps a hurricane in New York City.)

Well, Heinlein did it. I read every science fiction novel in that library. Math and science became interesting and I guess puberty had something to do with re-wiring my brain because the rest of junior and senior high school were a breeze. Everyone thought I was an outstanding student, when in fact it was just all so easy and I learned nothing about being a student. Hence going on to be a mediocre student at the Naval Academy.

Anyway, I studied engineering at the Naval Academy because I wanted to be a pilot and then an astronaut. But because my vision wasn't 20/20, and I was a mediocre student, naval aviation was barred to me. But I still loved technology.

For most of my life, I've observed the advance of technology, and for much of it I believed in its problem solving potential. Ironically, it's the internet that kind of finally killed that idea, chiefly encountering the thoughts of the minds behind The Cluetrain Manifesto, and Howard Rheingold who wrote a book called Tools for Thought, and also coined the term "smart mob."

Existence precedes narrative. Thought occurs below the level of language, and it is bound tightly to emotion, to feeling. I had a visceral reaction to the construction "smart mob." I don't think Howard Rheingold had ever been near a mob. I had. They are terrifying things, and they are by no measure "smart," nor can they be.

"Go home, Howard. You're drunk."

Technology can be intoxicating. Because it allows us to do things we couldn't do before, and gives us the illusion of power. Rather, it allows us to do things in ways we couldn't do them before.

Technology changes how we do things. It does not change what we do. Our problems lie in the latter. Technology expands what we do in space, and compresses it in time. I suppose our artifacts are an expansion in time, particularly the more durable ones, like the pyramids.

But habits are powerful things, and for better or worse, much of my attention still goes to technology and the news about it. Sometimes it's interesting, and I can still derive some enjoyment from it. But I'm no longer enamored with it.

And I don't believe in the notion of "tools for thought." I understand the "external brain." The use of manipulatives to facilitate analysis, drawing lines in the sand, printing graphs on the computer. But thought occurs in the brain, and we're, well at least, I'm not certain how.

Tools for thought? Caffeine and a sandwich.

How does technology facilitate choosing what to think about? Does it facilitate that? Or does it mislead us? Does it suggest avenues of thought? Recall the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp, because "that's where the light is."

When you've got a great hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Do the challenges we face stem from a dearth of tools, or an inability to think clearly? To know what's worth thinking about?

Why do we keep repeating the same mistakes? We know, for instance, that building more roads does not solve a "traffic problem." Partly it's because we've created institutions whose existence depends on building roads.

The automobile is a technology, a "tool for movement," that has brought about a whole sea of unintended consequences; because we were, and remain, incapable of thinking past them, imagining what problems might arise. Or because the emotional value of those thoughts didn't overcome the desire to make money by building cars or roads anyway.

The "smart phone" is similarly a new technology that, at first, seems wonderful. So why are we talking about banning them in schools?

We've thought about externalities. We know that our "capitalist" system doesn't doesn't include the cost of our products in their price. We know this, and we know it will doom us, yet we do nothing about it.

"Tools for thought," mostly is about drawing lines in the sand. Or links between files. It can facilitate some forms of analysis, if you're asking the right questions. But focusing on the tool, without thinking about the question, is just mental masturbation.

We are better off thinking about our faculty of attention. It's limited. What do we choose to direct it toward? How do we choose?

We are better off thinking about our ignorance. (The nature of ignorance is that we don't know what we don't know.)

We are better off thinking about how limited our cognitive abilities really are. If we understand their limitations, we might choose to use them toward better aims.

I think this fascination, this passion, for tools for thought is a waste of time.

I think our time is better spent thinking about how we choose to live in this world. What are the consequences of our choices? What is a "good life"? How do we "make meaning," in this life? Is it by "linking all the things." Tending our "digital gardens"?

Time, attention and thought are finite resources. The most powerful thing you can do with them is choose wisely.

I'm not holding myself out as an example. These are just my thoughts as I was able to distill them from an emotional response I had to a little meetup.

As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. You are strongly encouraged to do your own thinking.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 04:16 Monday, 4 December 2023

All we ever have are moments to live.

Most days I have this feeling that I'm sailing aboard the Titanic. I've heard rumors of icebergs lurking about.

But they're just rumors.

Full speed ahead!

The Washington Post published an opinion piece by Robert Kagan that opened with this:

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.

Pretty bracing, no?

It should be.

Democracy's fatal weakness is human nature. In any population, there is a significant minority of people who welcome authoritarian government, especially if it promises to look after them.

You can't tell me that a parliamentary style of government would work any better. Nazi Germany was a parliamentary model. Britain got Brexit and Boris Johnson. Israel has Netanyahu.

There will always be a significant number of people, of any ideological persuasion, who will welcome a "strong leader" to provide simple answers to complex questions. To give the illusion of creating order amidst the chaos.

The people opposing them will be divided, disagreeing about what is to be done, and therefore weak.

Or disinclined to oppose the authoritarian because they don't perceive themselves as among the groups that would suffer under authoritarian rule; and unenthusiastic about the opposition because there's nothing in it for them.

That's what happened in Germany in 1933.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe that followed, most of the survivors persuaded themselves that they were among the "good Germans." They had nothing to do with the atrocities. They didn't support the policies. They were just "little people."

It will be the same way in America.

And while we're not kidding ourselves, we might get around to recognizing that we will never make the necessary effort to arrest climate change. That global warming will bring about the collapse of this civilization.

Extreme wealth inequality leads to political revolutions. Climate change leads to a collapse of civilizations.

Today we live in a global civilization with extreme wealth inequality and global climate change.

The only question is the velocity, and the degree of violence. If we can avoid a nuclear exchange, that would be a wonderful outcome.

In any case, I think it's going to happen much sooner than anyone thinks.

Originally posted at Notes From the Underground 11:27 Saturday, 2 December 2023

My affinity for alliteration aside, it's actually sunny out.

I've been mulling over what to do with the XZ-2 with the de-centered lens. It occurred to me that the jpeg engine allows for a different aspect ratio, including 1:1 (square). So I played with that a bit, and it's pretty bad even at that aspect ratio.

So I figure I'll just use it at 1:1 with an art filter for shots when I'm "just playing around." I don't want to sell it for parts or anything.

In other news, I've also been playing around in Flickr. They announced some new feature related to stats, which I confess I don't really understand since I never paid attention to stats before. But since they brought it to my attention, I've started looking at it.

I don't get many views. Most photos get about 5 in the first couple of days after I upload them. I think those are my "followers." The others appear to pop up in searches, and it seems that most searches relate to tags. So I've started tagging more photos.

If I tag them in Photos, the tags get uploaded to Flickr along with the image. For shots that I've already uploaded, I've been using Flickr's Camera Roll editor to bulk tag images where I can.

Which made me take a closer look at Camera Roll. I like the fact that you can look at photos by the date taken. So I can see places and events where I haven't uploaded or made any images public. For a while, I was letting Flickr Uploader just upload every SD card I ever put in my Mac. It seemed to just make Flickr as impossible to manage as Photos, so I stopped doing that. But I'm glad that I did, because I can find some images that seem to be missing in Photos, or I only have a 3MP version in Photos but the full size in Flickr.

So I've been editing a few older shots and re-uploading them. (Download the larger version from Flickr, and edit on the Mac where I'm familiar with all the tools.)

Sent Mom a card with a pic of an old truck I took in Fernandina Beach back in June 2017. That was back when I was very active on FB and IG, so there's only one post in the Marmot from June 2017. I may have shared this truck in FB, I don't know. Anyway, I figure I'll spend some more time squaring my Flickr account away, since I'm paying for it.

I ran out of 5x7 photo greeting card stock for Mom, so I've switched over to square until I get some more. I shot the truck with my old XZ-2, which is what gave me the idea to shoot the bad one in square format, as mentioned above.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 13:43 Friday, 1 December 2023