Something I've never seen here before. This appears to be an American Pekin domestic duck, much larger than the mallard it's next to. Also seems to have something stuck in its bill.

Florida accounted for 20% of the nation's new enrollments in Obamacare last year. 3.2M Floridians signed up, a new record. 426,000 Floridians remain without any health insurance because Florida's Republican legislature won't expand Medicaid.

Very breezy this morning, ahead of a line of thunderstorms expected this afternoon. E-M10 Mk4 with the 14-150mm zoom, dramatic tone filter applied. A mood.

Since I've cut back on my Twitter usage, I've subscribed to a lot of RSS feeds.

I have two feeds devoted to Twitter. One is my "Locals" list (which includes a few non-locals), which is where I spent most of my time on Twitter. The other is my "mentions."

I also subscribe to a number of National Weather Service feeds, and some of those post very frequently with conditions updates.

There are a number of local news sites that offer RSS, and I subscribe to those as well.

Finally, there are a lot of blogs I've discovered and subscribed to.

The "unread" feed can get very large, very fast. On the Mac, it's easy to just down-arrow through the timeline, skipping over weather updates or Tweets are kind of meaningless absent some of the context which doesn't always come over in RSS. But it can feel like a slog.

So yesterday I spent some time dividing things up into folders on NetNewsWire. That makes it easy to dip into the NWS feed and just "mark all as read," if there isn't a weather situation developing.

Similarly, I can quickly scan mentions on Twitter to see if there's something I should reply to.

It's easy and pleasant on the iPhone to swipe through blog updates, starring the ones I might want to return to.

I need to look into RSS for Mastodon, micro.blog and YouTube so I can add those. Then NetNewsWire would be the central place where I would go for new content from things I have a persistent interest in following.

Folders make it easy to kind of prioritize subjects and manage attention.

I don't know, I think this RSS thing might catch on.

I think about Apple's rumored virtual reality/augmented reality device in terms of something like this post at Matt Webb's Interconnected blog. And I regard Apple's Freeform app as a kind of introduction to this sort of networked collaborative workspace.

Freeform has utility in its present form, but I wonder if it isn't serving a couple of purposes for Apple. First is introducing users to the idea networked collaboration, and second is to gather data on how people use it.

Matt's post about the "map room" is something that might be able to be realized in a virtual reality setting, affording, or helping to establish, the shared context necessary for effective collaboration.

Personally, what I'm looking forward to with VR is the opportunity to explore distant places in a somewhat immersive experience. The ability to visit historic places without hundreds or thousands of tourists present. To experience them at any time of the day or night, unconstrained by a travel schedule or transportation. The chance to see places without dumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere just to get to them.

But I also get excited about the potential for collaboration as Matt describes, and I think Apple may be too.

I think universities and research facilities may be the first to employ this type of capability. Corporations would soon follow. As the technology advances, becomes smaller, lighter and cheaper, I can see it being introduced in secondary schools.

Pretty cool, I think.

Get me to the holodeck.

Watched The Menu last night. Brilliant. Loved it. Hard to say anything about it without spoilers, but definitely worth seeing.

With regard to the preceding post, it may be later than anyone thinks.

If you're one of the lucky few people who thinks in terms of "generational wealth," and is looking at property in Florida, you may want to review your Florida property portfolio.

It's later than you think.

To be fair, Ron DeSantis is merely a symptom, the logical consequence of a political monoculture where accountability is a concept and never a consequence. A monoculture that encourages corruption and rewards people's worst political instincts.

Darkness grows in the Sunshine State.

Folks considering moving to Jacksonville, Florida's largest city, might want to listen to this most recent episode of a local news/commentary program, First Coast Connect. Get a sense for how well this place is governed.

Spoiler alert: Not well at all.

Roughly 1K people move to Florida every day. Probably for "no state income tax," and the climate (for now, anyway). Maybe they should do a little due diligence to see what they're getting themselves into.

Over a generation of one-party Republican rule, here's a reflection of Florida's safety net under Ron DeSantis from Save the Children. (Click on Florida in the interactive map for details on its rank of 42.)

After more than a generation of one-party Republican rule, Florida ranks 35th in overall child well-being according the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Shows where children rank in Republicans' priorities: Somewhere in the bottom half.

DeSantis has had a taste of power in his first term; and now he has an insatiable appetite for it. From exploiting and abusing migrants, to removing democratically elected officials, to establishing official state dogma to replace education curricula. He's an authoritarian.

While I'm reviewing streaming series, we watched Season 3 of Prime's Jack Ryan. Meh. Better than Season 2, nowhere near as good as Season 1. I think they should just drop the "analyst" bullshit and make him a "double-nought spy."

Mitzi and I have been enjoying Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman's Butler on HBO Max. I probably enjoy it more than Mitzi because she doesn't care for graphic violence. I hadn't heard any buzz about this series from 2019, but it's remarkably good. Dorothy Atkinson as Alfie's mom, Mary, standout performance. Love it.

If we're fortunate enough to preserve the working elements of this civilization, and eliminate the elements that are driving its collapse, I think one of the important underserved aspects of mental health treatment and understanding will be our faculty of attention.

There are aspects of our physiology and psychology that are pro-social, because humans are social organisms. We cannot survive for long as solitary individuals, and we do not prosper or progress except in groups.

What our evolution never anticipated, and what our technology has created, is a social environment that includes interactions, either direct or indirect, with hundreds or thousands of people. For "celebrities" and politicians, multiply that by a couple orders of magnitude.

I don't see that technological aspect diminishing, or going away entirely, absent an overall collapse of civilization. We're going to have to learn how to live with it in a way that is compatible with good mental health.

I used to write about this back in Groundhog Day, and I called it "social hygiene," an analog to "personal hygiene." Just as we learned to wash our hands after using the toilet, to brush our teeth and bathe, to wear clean clothes and so on, to preserve our physical health, we'll have to learn new practices with regard to networked social interactions to preserve our mental health.

And in the larger public sphere, just as we have regulations governing economic activity to promote and protect public health, we'll need a regulatory environment that does the same for mental health. This won't be easy because "muh freedoms!" seem to be at odds with public health in many ways, and people seeking power exploit attention with misinformation and lies to gain it.

I was uncomfortable with Facebook for a long time. To be sure, there were elements that I enjoyed a great deal, which is what kept me coming back. But there were always aspects I didn't care for. What tipped the balance was when I ran for public office and experienced the kind of negative attention one can receive from random strangers.

And it became clear to me that the platform itself promoted and facilitated the growth and display of hostility and aggression. Social media platforms are emphatically not "safe spaces." And anyone who hasn't experienced that aspect is simply fortunate to have never been a target worthy of "attention."

One of the things I did before I stepped away from most political activity was to share what I learned about running for office in a handbook for locals interested in running a campaign. (Don't ask me why the Florida Democratic Party doesn't already have one. We're not an "organized" political party.)

To be a candidate requires some social media presence. I advised that a candidate should never read their own social media accounts. A volunteer should read the posts or replies and provide any relevant feedback to the candidate. This volunteer would be what was sometimes called a "shit screen" back when I was midshipman.

There are a couple of important reasons why a public official should avoid social media. The first is that it's an energy sump. It just saps your enthusiasm. Second, it also drains your empathy for human beings. You understand at an abstract level that "not everyone is like this," but you also understand, intuitively, that yes, sometimes everyone is like this.

And why would you want to serve anyone like this?

There are rewards, chiefly dopamine, for the experience of receiving attention on social media. People liking your photos, laughing at your jokes, validating your opinions; and if you confine yourself to a small group, or an "echo chamber," you can experience those.

But, one slip, and you could be the victim of a virtual mob.

Silos aggregate attention for the purposes of extracting data and selling eyeballs. To be profitable, the must aggregate in huge numbers, which is also what makes them so dangerous.

Even small social networks, like adolescent girls with the mobile phones in junior high, can be dangerous places, especially given the vulnerability of adolescents.

I wrote about "social hygiene" about a decade ago. I should check. But I haven't seen any progress and, if anything, it's only gotten worse.

It's just one more dimension of our advanced technological civilization keeping nearly 8 billion people alive on this planet that isn't working for us. It is playing a role in bringing about its collapse. Whether we can address it, or the other ones (unregulated capitalism, fossil fuel energy, gross inequality) sufficiently to prevent collapse is a question to which I expect I may live to see the answer.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:16 Friday, 20 January 2023

The chilling effect of right-wing radical Ron DeSantis' "Don't say gay" bill was on prominent display in the decision to cancel a Jacksonville high school production of the play Indecent. Rabbi Jonathan Lubliner offers important thoughts.

DeSantis is focusing on transgender students in the state university system. And we know it's not to promote their best interests.

Put the DJI Mini 2 up this morning for the launch. Not spectacular, but not terrible. The bright spot in the sky above the contrail is sun glint from a jet aircraft that happened just as I was taking the shot. Larger version at Flickr.

Sold my Fujifilm X20 yesterday. Buyer was a young petty officer who was a totally squared-away sailor. Showed up early, (I was on time) had cash, and in the exact amount. Hope she enjoys the camera, seems it's her first "real" camera. Pretty good one to start with and grow into.

Shooting film. Decade-old CCD digicams. Super-8 movies. Static HTML.

Retro is cool. Perhaps because it's more constraining, it's more liberating.

I'm a static html kind of guy, but it's not because I'm cool, it's because I'm not that bright! I've been posting hand-rolled static html for probably close to 20 years now.

More accurately, Tinderbox has been wrapping html around whatever it is I do here for that long.

In the early days, Tinderbox seemed to be used a lot for blogging. There were folks creating Tinderbox files to use as templates for blogging. That's how the marmot got started, originally as Groundhog Day, using a simple template called Gray Flannel, which is why the marmot has the structure it has, where posts are archived by the month. I've been tweaking it, and it definitely looks different today, but most of the major pieces are the same.

I had to do a significant refactoring not long ago, because the file structure was becoming very unwieldy. I lost a bunch of images in the process because I wasn't careful. My fault, nothing to do with Tinderbox.

It's much better now, and if you're considering doing your own thing regardless of how, I'd say it's important to spend a good deal of time thinking about structure for the long term. Just in case this becomes a habit or something.

Tinderbox is a vastly different application today than it was twenty years ago. Far more powerful with a built-in programming language for text manipulation and a sophisticated export code for creating documents.

Some time back, it became scriptable with AppleScript. I use that to automate posting images from Photos. I promised I'd do a post about that at the forum. It can talk to the command line if you want it to. It can pull data from web services, as the Wx data in a titled post shows. It's amazingly versatile and I don't use a tenth of its features.

People lament that there isn't an iOS version. They can't work on their Tinderbox files on their iPads. That's true, but if you want Tinderbox to capture content you create on your iOS device, it can do that via a feature called "watched folders." It can watch Apple Notes, or any folder you want in iCloud. Create your text in Drafts or Ulysses and have Tinderbox import it automatically, then have Tinderbox put that text wherever you want it programmatically.

All the cool kids love markdown these days. Tinderbox speaks markdown now. I like RTF, it's fine with me. I'm old, but I'm not old enough to be cool yet. Maybe in another decade?

Jack Baty is a blogger who blogs with Tinderbox. Sometimes. Jack's flirtations with blogging and note-taking platforms and applications kind of reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live skit. ("Frequency of a cheap ham radio." 😜)

I enjoy reading Jack's posts about the virtues and frustrations of the different tools he uses. I envy the facility and mental agility he has to do useful things with vastly disparate programs, as well as his skill behind the camera and in the darkroom.

Tinderbox is sometimes viewed as intimidating to a newcomer; but there is an active, supportive community around the application, and help is readily available. There's a weekly (alternating Saturdays and Sundays) Zoom meet-up to discuss issues or demonstrate features. It definitely rewards persistence and consistent use.

Tinderbox is a very modern, quite sophisticated computer application. It's about as far from retro as you can get in computing. But you can do a lot with Tinderbox without necessarily knowing a lot as, hopefully, the marmot demonstrates.

Which is definitely cool.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:08 Tuesday, 17 January 2023

Click on this link in Safari on your iPhone (or other iOS device). Touch the "sharrow" and select "Add to Home Screen." See or hear a plane overhead you're curious about? Pretty cool.

On Sunday I posted an image I took from my driveway of a rocket leaving earth and two parts of it returning for a powered landing. Last night I posted an image of the light trail caused by the International Space Station as it passes overhead. In that image there are also a couple of satellites and a bunch of passenger-carrying planes flying overhead.

Yesterday morning, I heard a low plane buzzing overhead. I pulled a small computer from my pocket and touched an icon that said Track Aircraft. It showed me what the plane was and where it came from, how high it was (1700 feet) and how fast it was going (200mph).

I have a little handheld radio next to my recliner. When there's a thunderstorm underway, I can turn it on and listen to pilots talking to regional air traffic control about changing altitudes. I can't hear ATC, they're beyond line of sight. Sometimes I can hear the St Augustine tower.

Every day, thousands of people fly overhead, oblivious to me below and, most of the time, me to them above.

Every now and then, you just have to pause and at least acknowledge what's going on around you.

Pretty remarkable.

I get a text alert from Spot the Station when the ISS will be visible overhead from Ponte Vedra. Since this would be about an hour after sunset, and the ISS is so bright, I thought it'd be a good opportunity. But there's still a lot of sky glow to the west, and there were high, thin clouds that I think helped diminish the station's brightness.

It was overhead for 6 minutes, but I didn't spot it until just before it reached the trees, about where light trail gets very obvious in the image, which I tweaked a bit.