I now have a runny nose again. Not as bad as it was at first, but still a surprise.

My tooth is somewhat(?) better. It's still quite sensitive, but it's in the 8-9 range. If I'm careful, I can manage to eat nearly anything I want, although there will be some pain.

Mitzi and I are back in the same bed, and we're dog-sitting. I suspect that's kind of affecting my sleep. I'm actually feeling more tired now than I was when I was taking the Paxlovid. But a nap mostly restores my energy level, for a while anyway.

If the tooth didn't hurt, I'd say I was pretty much done with Covid.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 13:02 Tuesday, 1 October 2024

For those who may feel that I'm being a little too harsh on Mr. Millinor, please note that I know we're living here on borrowed time. If we have a catastrophic loss, we are not "rebuilding" here.

There may be questions regarding HOA requirements and so on, but the "concept of a plan" is to use the insurance proceeds, such as they may be, and pay off the mortgage. Do what we have to to scrape off the slab, sell the lot and move. Get the hell out of Florida. Let some other fool assume this risk.

Borrowed time.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:46 Tuesday, 1 October 2024

This video tells a different story. Same place, different people.

And a closing shot that offers at least a glimpse of the truth.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:45 Tuesday, 1 October 2024

It seems Shannon Millinor, Good Ol' Boy from the preceding post, is something of a community spokesperson and this ain't his first rodeo.

Or hurricane.

Where can we find an accounting of state and federal dollars that went into Keaton Beach a year ago after Idalia?

Put a number on what "we" are doing.

Year after year.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:36 Tuesday, 1 October 2024

Uh, who is "we," kemosabe?

Here it is, the archetypal disaster report, closed on a note of earnest, homespun resilience. "We will rebuild."

Nowhere in the report is our stalwart survivor interrogated as to just exactly how, or who "we" represents.

Because, as sure as I'm sittin' here, our straw-hatted Good Ol' Boy doesn't have the resources to rebuild. And by "we" he means that you and I and every other sucker is going to have to pitch in and help him enjoy "our little paradise."

At least between catastrophic storms anyway.

We already subsidize living on the beach for those who wish to embrace that risk. We shovel tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into the ocean to "renourish" the sand the ocean washes away. An ocean that's rising, and wave action that's growing more energetic with increasing average wind speeds. We pay higher insurance rates all over the state, in part, to offset the risk Good Ol' Boy takes on to live where he does.

Folks in Kenosha, Wisconsin are helping Good Ol' Boy live in his little paradise with their federal tax dollars spent by FEMA.

Good Ol' Boy doesn't care.

I love the way PBS just ignores the question. Sure, it might be too much to put it directly to Good Ol' Boy in his hour of suffering. But they could have asked someone. Illuminated this illusion that "we" isn't just Good Ol' Boy and his fishin' buddies.

"Other folks got their stuff." Yeah, "their stuff" is subsidizing his dumb ass.

Florida. You have to be insane to live here.

Or a dumb ass.

Unsure which category I'm in.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:14 Tuesday, 1 October 2024

I'm at the point in my life when so many of my early favorites are reaching the end of theirs. A remarkable artist and human being.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:43 Monday, 30 September 2024

Meant to mention this earlier, but Garret has been on a photographic excursion out west and posting some remarkable photos! (So be sure to check the earlier ones too.)

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:32 Monday, 30 September 2024

North Carolina was supposed to be someplace "safe."

Ain't nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide.

Fire and flood. Coming for us all.

Have a great Monday, y'all!

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:41 Monday, 30 September 2024

We were all kind of hoping that the "quiet" hurricane season would continue, but I guess that was foolish.

What I fail to understand is that we seem to be unable to realize that we are living with a civilization, a physical infrastructure and a "sense" of what weather should be like, from a climate that no longer exists.

It's not "climate change," it's "climate changed."

Yes, it is ongoing. Yes, it is likely to get worse. That is to say, be even more of a departure from what everything around us was built to accommodate.

But the climate has changed.

We are seeing, before our eyes, how unprepared, how unsuited our infrastructure, our standards, our practices are for the new climate we find ourselves in.

Anyway, this was a sobering segment yesterday. She's wrong about being prepared though.

We knew this was coming. We knew this would happen. We had an opportunity to stop it, or slow it, or adapt to it; but we failed to do any of that.

Because of power and greed.

And now we're paying the price.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:20 Monday, 30 September 2024

I hope millions of Americans still watch 60 Minutes. Timely story from last night about insurance companies not paying hurricane claims.

You do have to be crazy to live here.

Explains the whole "Florida man" thing.

Oh, and recall how aggressively Florida man Ron DeSantis went after purported "voter fraud."

The Ian victims were before the new "heads I win, tails you lose" insurance reforms enacted by the legislature. Now it's virtually impossible to sue.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:35 Monday, 30 September 2024

<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2024/Images/IMG_0021.JPG" alt=“Apple II hi-res image of an “Archemedes spiral” (3d mathematical plot) on a 32” LCD tv.">

Took the last dose of Paxlovid this morning. I suppose that means I'm "cured."

An encouraging sign was my tooth didn't hurt as much. At first. I was able to eat a bagel and egg sandwich for breakfast. No real pain at first, some discomfort. By the end, it was pretty painful, but it wasn't in the "goes to 11" range. 9 to 10, maybe. It's calmed down since then. Some new pain in the lower jaw, right side, but not severe. Believe this may be the last holdout of the virus.

Too bad I'm out of Paxlovid. Hopefully my immune system can mop up from here.

Nevertheless, it was very encouraging. I thought I was looking at another root canal. Maybe I still am, but... maybe not.

Anyway, minor congestion/gunk here and there. Unsure how I would have fared minus the anti-viral.

In other news, spent most of yesterday and earlier this morning partying like it's 1985.

I have a Floppy Emu from Big Mess O'Wires for the //c. The main //c I use is a model 4100, so it can boot 32MB ProDOS images, essentially giving me a hard drive. The "other" //c (with the broken keycaps) is a 4000, so it can't use volumes larger than 143K. A ROM swap would remedy that, but I'm not planning to do that at this point. Maybe later when I get the ROM+cx installed in main //c. That'll give me a 32K ROM I can install in the 4000.

The next challenge is creating 32MB HD images to place on the micro-SD card for the Emu.

I use Virtual II on my Macs, and it has an "OmniDisk," a fictional peripheral that can read ProDOS volumes larger than the 143K of a 5.25" floppy. You can "create" new disks in the app, so I did, and proceeded to copy a bunch of programs and utilities onto it, creating subdirectories and so on. That way I could play around on the //c without having to fuss with the Emu to change floppies.

Well, after a lot of work, I went to go boot my //c from my "OmniDisk" .2MG 32MB disk image. Long story short, couldn't get it to work.

I'm still uncertain exactly why it's working now, but I essentially started from scratch. The key thing, I think, was formatting the new OmniDisk in ProDOS. You can mount a folder from MacOS as a drive using the OmniDisk, and I suspect I may have just been creating a folder, which is meaningless to the Emu and the real //c.

Anyway, that's "Archimedes Spiral," which takes a long time to plot in BASIC on real hardware. I didn't time it because I decided to just go make breakfast.

More playing around to do now. Hopefully I'm past this Covid thing, though I'm not certain.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:09 Sunday, 29 September 2024

Two doses of Paxlovid remaining. I felt as though I slept "well" last night. Looking at the sleep data from my watch, there's a reason for that. I got over an hour of "deep" sleep, which is about twice my average.

I don't know if that's good, bad or indifferent, but I don't recall tossing and turning as much.

Minor upper respiratory congestion. Little cough. Minor sinus congestion. ("Minor," though still indicative of some infection.) Don't feel feverish.

Tooth is still very sensitive. I'm worried that it's going to remain that way for some time. My experience with crowns has been that once a tooth has been traumatized, it takes me months to get them to calm down. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. When I'm not careful, and I spike it, I can feel pain in the tooth, extending up behind the right side of my nose, below my right eye, curling around to my right ear, fully involving nearly all of the right side of my head. It "only" lasts for several seconds before beginning to subside, but it's excruciating.

I have a cleaning coming up soon (and that may not even be possible), I'll speak to my dentist. But for now, this sucks.

And this isn't a case of me traumatizing the tooth by biting into a concrete sandwich or something. This all happened because of Covid.

Fuck you, Moderna.

I'm drinking warm water with the meds. I can, if I'm careful, sip room temperature drinks. But at least I've figured out how to take the pills without driving myself to my knees. The key is not to let the liquid hit the tooth, and don't let my tongue or lips get too cold.

The good news is that, if I keep my mouth shut, it's quiet.

So, at least I've got that goin' for me.

I guess.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:37 Saturday, 28 September 2024

You don't have to be crazy to live here, but it helps.

<blockquote>The city pulled the plug on the Northeast Water Reclamation Facility at 10:46 p.m. Thursday, after thousands of households and businesses in the city’s most low-lying areas were without power, flooded and unable to leave. Residents in northeast St. Petersburg, a quarter of the city’s total population, were told they could not flush the toilet, shower or put anything down the drain for at least 48 hours. The city had warned that sewage may back up into people’s homes and businesses and create sanitary sewer overflows. Public Works Administrator Claude Tankersley said raw sewage came up through 20 manholes throughout the city, mostly in the northeast with one report for the southeast.</blockquote>

Cool.

None of this is a surprise. We've known about this for decades.

Yet, we've done nothing.

Why? Greed. Power. Ambition. Ideological blindness.

And it is only going to get worse.

Even now, you'll find state leaders, nearly all of them Republicans, kind of bragging on how Florida is "leaning forward" into "resiliency."

Yeah, when they're not fighting abortion amendments, banning books, going after trans kids, de-funding public schools, chasing after their personal political ambitions.

We've squandered all of our best opportunities to take proactive steps as the problem grew larger and the available solution set shrank. All that's left now are "too little" and "too late."

But denial is a powerful drug, and we're not going to face that reality either.

All we can do now is eat this shit sandwich.

And, as always, the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:22 Saturday, 28 September 2024

I closed my SmugMug account this morning. They kindly sent me a renewal reminder and the price was going up. I haven't used SmugMug much recently, focusing most of my online sharing on Flickr.

I will compliment the management at SmugMug, they made it very discoverable and easy to close my account. I appreciate their respect for my time.

I like SmugMug. If I sold images or prints or anything, I'd stay with it. I think I started the account with an idea of trying that, but I never did anything with it.

Now I'll need to make some changes to the marmot.

But first I think I'm going to take a nap.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:52 Friday, 27 September 2024

<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2024/Images/IMG_0010.JPG" alt=“Screenshot of the Ambient Weather app in iOS showing the distinct “v” in the barometric pressure graph”>

Been mostly awake since 0300. From the screenshot, this was from 0416. We're now in Helene's wake. Haven't checked the news reports yet.

Very little here as a rain event, less than half an inch. (I checked another Ambient station in the neighborhood, similar reading.) The wind sensor is nearly useless, but from the sounds of things, it was mostly a wind event. Could hear it howling last night.

It will be difficult to assess the affects of this hurricane for some time. Any thorough understanding will have to include the experience of Florida's insured, and they are very often quite forgotten.

The Florida legislature, like all of Florida's state government apparatus, has been ruled by the Republican Party of Florida for more than a generation, and their recent property insurance "reforms," were nothing more than a "heads I win, tails you lose" gift to the insurance industry.

I guess the insurance lobby could squeeze their balls more than the trial lawyers.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:18 Friday, 27 September 2024

I'd like to believe I'm improving, but this toothache is just a special kind of misery that I never expected to come along with this infection. It's quiet, most of the time. But any type of negative temperature gradient and it goes nuts, and how cold determines how painful, and it can be extremely painful.

Fewer "cold" symptoms this morning, but a headache is new. Some feeling of imbalance, though not lightheadedness. Tried to be mindful in the shower with my eyes shut washing my head. "Pay attention to your center." Foul taste was still present this morning, so why it fades sometimes is a mystery. Was finally smart enough to take my meds with warm tap water.

The beat goes on...

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:10 Friday, 27 September 2024

Watched Slow Horses and Bad Monkey last night. Bad Monkey is perhaps better than my initial impression. At least, I'm enjoying it more. I like the cast. I like the writing. I like most of the characters. Maybe they'll make another one.

Slow Horses is good, but it feels a bit "thin" this season. Only six episodes? A lot of characters, some new, we don't get any real time with any of them. The plot isn't especially compelling. And if some Middle Eastern state security crew prepped a death and dismemberment party for me, and then let me go to supposedly "finish the job," I'd finish it by disappearing.

Love watching the cast, but feel a bit let down by the action.

Which reminds me, I hate when the streaming services automatically transition you to a new episode of some other series, especially one you don't want to watch, while you're trying to read the credits!

The next time actors and writers strike, they should demand that the streaming platforms default to playing all the credits. Let the viewer decide if they want to skip them.

This modern life. I mean, Jesus, are they afraid if they don't shove some other series in front of my face I'll leave the couch or something? It's disrespect, really. It's rude.

Who's with me? Torches and pitchforks in the courtyard in an hour!

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:00 Thursday, 26 September 2024

Apart from the tooth, I generally felt pretty good. I wasn't going to go out and do a walk or anything, but I figured I'd try to get some little projects done.

I received some replacement rubber feet for the Apple IIe, so I decided I'd finish getting the case cleaned up and put all that back together, replacing the missing foot. That meant working in the garage, putting away all the stuff from the Swytch ebike conversion (still haven't heard back from their "support" people), making room on the bench and so on.

A fair amount of walking back and forth, collecting trash, and so on. Took both pieces of the case into the kitchen and washed them in the sink. (They look pretty nice now. Not "new" after >40 years, but only minor blemishes.) Got everything back together and considered doing some more work with the expansion cards.

But walking around, I began to feel a little lightheaded. I did a blood oxygen reading with the watch, 92%. Hmmm...

So I put the IIe away and went looking for the pulse oximeter. Felt even more lightheaded and decided to sit down.

May be low blood sugar, I haven't been eating much. Took a number of readings, low 90s. "Low" is supposedly below 90%, so maybe it's blood sugar. Found the pulse oximeter, it's within a percentage of the watch. Checked the Health app, and to the extent that there's a "trend," it's improving somewhat. Tuesday was my lowest range, dipping down to 90%, Wednesday's range being about the same, but today reaching 100% at some point. So it's probably not blood oxygen. I could do a needle stick and find out my blood glucose, but I don't feel like it. I'm going to have some baked beans for lunch, and there's plenty of sugar in that.

I had them last night because I don't have to heat them up very much, and I don't need to bite down on them. Forget making a sandwich, anything I'd need to chomp on to ingest is out.

I don't know if I'm getting used to the foul taste in my mouth, or if my liver is getting more efficient at metabolizing the antiviral, but the taste is largely gone, and I'm only halfway through the dose (6 hours). If I start feeling feverish in a couple of hours, that'll be a clue.

Rain bands are starting to roll through and the landscapers were next door mowing the lawn! And running the leaf-blowers. Now the guy across the street has decided it's the prefect time to pressure wash his sidewalk.

I generally feel ok, but I'm no less cranky.

Anyway, I've dialed back my ambitions a little bit.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:38 Thursday, 26 September 2024

If it seems like I'm more prolific recently, I am.

It hurts my tooth to talk. Mitzi says she likes that. (She kids. She loves me.)

Normally, this time in the morning, I'm out on a walk and when I get back I spend time reading the feeds and making breakfast. I'm not exercising and it hurts to eat, so here I am.

Lucky you.

(Also it's 80°F degrees out! 90% humidity at wherever NWC is reporting from, but 93% here. Can you feel 3% difference in humidity? Maybe not. But still...)

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:17 Thursday, 26 September 2024

This sort of thing waxes and wanes over time, but man. Must be a convergence zone or something.

Passion, greed, hubris, lawyers, butt-hurt.

How much longer before this becomes a high-value series production on a premiere streaming platform?

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:10 Thursday, 26 September 2024

There are some things that Apple gets right and that I appreciate. I always like that scene when John Candy is introduced as Uncle Buck in the classic comedy of the same name. The clapper! (IYKYK)

Normally, I wake and get dressed in the dark because Mitzi doesn't get up as early as I do. I always put my clothes in the same place, I can find everything by knowing where to reach. The phone puts out enough light without using the flashlight to navigate, though I can walk through the bedroom in the dark with little difficulty. Sleeping separately now (Covid), I say "Hey Siri, Dave's lamp on."

I seldom have any trouble with Siri controlling any of the devices enrolled in Home. Mostly lights, but also my office fan and she can set all four speeds. (The one thing I don't like in my office, apart from size, is I probably bought too large a fan and I have all recessed ceiling lights. When the fan's on, it casts a moving shadow. Seldom a problem though. I usually only run the fan after a walk or a bike ride, and that's usually after it's light enough out to see what I'm doing.)

Anyway, I have my own little Ambient weather station, and I check it often, especially with an approaching storm. There's a bookmark for it in the Favorites bar in Safari. But that opens another tab, and their layout doesn't look great in a wide window. For whatever reason, all my Safari tabs are opened full-width. This morning I thought I'd try that thing where you can treat a page like its own app and keep it in the dock. It opens as its own window, without any Safari UI chrome, and I can narrow the width to make all the widgets look normal.

It wasn't hard to find, amazingly. (File=>Add to Dock...) I'd heard about it, and probably seen it once or twice in videos, but never used it before. I didn't have to search for instructions on how to use it, I just looked in the menu item I where I thought it most likely would be found - File. And there it was, discoverable! And it "just worked."

Refreshing.

But mostly Apple is headed in the wrong direction and is getting worse over time and I'm not optimistic about it recovering anytime soon. Saint Tim might worship at the alter of "customer sat," but he sleeps with shareholders and quarterly earnings reports.

That's the problem with being the "Number One," in anything. There's nowhere else to go but down.

Probably should have called this "Praise, Correct," but too late now.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:37 Thursday, 26 September 2024

Becoming feverish as the antiviral wanes is a real thing. Sweating this morning, AC is set at 75. More upper respiratory involvement now. Productive cough. Blood O2 is fine, >95%. One outlier at 92% last night. Tooth now sensitive to touch. Root canal in my future? I shudder to think what I'd be feeling if I hadn't gone with the Plaxovid.

And, fuck you Moderna.

They seem to be "first to market" when the FDA approves the updated vaccines. I would have preferred to wait for Pfizer, but we were traveling and some protection was better than none. It always seems like when we're getting ready to travel, theres a new variant, a new vax and Moderna is the only one available at Publix.

Seems sketchy.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:27 Thursday, 26 September 2024

<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2024/Images/IMG_0005.JPG" alt=“Photo of the game screen of the classic Apple II arcade game, Lode Runner on a 32” flat screen tv in a cluttered office”>

Faded a bit after lunch, but rallied later. Feeling a little feverish now, but otherwise ok. Tooth is still a nightmare. Maybe I'll lose a little weight?

Figured I'd spend a little quality time with the //c. I'm stuck on level 6 now, because I let myself get trapped in a room with no way to shoot myself out. I recall there was some keyboard combination that basically exited the game, but I don't think you could record your score. So I'll reboot the computer in a minute, but I wanted to post something here.

I mentioned we'd switched to IQ Fiber for our internet service, and I'm very pleased with the service so far. It comes with an app that lets you see everything that's on your network. I have a Motorola MG8702 cable modem/wifi router that we used when we had Xfinity, and there was this MotoSync iOS app that let you see everything on your network. But a later update basically lobotomized it and it was useless. (Cool. Just remembered to delete it.) But the IQ Fiber app goes a bit further and lets you turn internet access on and off, selectively, by device.

I think you may have been able do that with MotoSync, but it wasn't easily discoverable.

I discovered it playing around with the app yesterday. So I turned off internet access to the TV in the office. It's a TCL 32" LCD with Roku embedded in it. I actually use it to watch streaming in the office when Mitzi's watching something I'm not interested in, or I'm isolating because of Covid. But it doesn't need internet access all the time. And I suspect the little bastard eavesdrops on me. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

Anyway, I'm eluding the Bungeling guards and stealing their gold and this little white light keeps flashing at the bottom of the TV. It's a bit distracting and I'm wondering what that's about. Then it dawned on me, it's probably bitching about the internet! Heh. I'll turn it back on later. New episodes of Bad Monkey and Slow Horses tonight! (Sounds like I'm watching Animal Planet.)

So the foul taste in my mouth fades over time. I suspect that's my liver clearing the antiviral. It's a 2-drug "cocktail" and one of them impairs the liver's ability to metabolize the antiviral, allowing it to circulate longer in the bloodstream. A technique, I gather, developed in the effort to fight HIV.

As the taste fades, it seems my temperature is going up slightly. I don't feel particularly "sick," just hot. I don't know how responsive my immune system is to "viral load," and maybe this is all just in my head, The recommendation is to take the two doses, one in the morning and one at "bed time." Well, "morning" and "bedtime" are pretty ambiguous terms to me. Easy to remember, I guess.

Being an eager beaver, I took my first dose when Mitzi got them home, about 1430 yesterday. I did not take one at bedtime, because they caution you against taking too much. They advise skipping a dose if you miss the regular time by more than 8 hours, and resuming at the normal "morning" or "bedtime," whichever was next.

My second dose was at 0500 this morning. I'm trying to figure out what this 8-hour "window" thing is about. Ideally, it seems you'd want to take the doses 12-hours apart. For an early riser like me, that's at 0500 and 1700. And "bedtime" is usually before 2200. Assuming a notional 2200, "Taps, taps. Lights out. Maintain silence about the decks," that's only a 7-hour interval between the "bedtime" and "morning" doses, but a 17-hour interval between the "morning" and "bedtime" does.

A wiser man would consult the doc, but I'm going with the 12-hour interval. My "second" dose would have been at 0230 this morning. 0500 is only 2.5 hours later, and well within the 8-hour "margin of error." And all subsequent doses will be at precisely 0500 and 1700, because I had a Plebe Year. "Time tide and formation wait for no man."

As of this moment, that's about seven minutes from now. So let me conclude this little chronological ("horological"?) inquiry and post!

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 16:13 Wednesday, 25 September 2024

Had my second course of Paxlovid this morning. Slept ok last night. (I seldom sleep "well.") No fever or chills, no muscle aches apart from the usual ones. Less of a runny nose, but still, well, runny.

The worst part is my right front tooth. The left one had a root canal in 1977 when a guy who was in a pep rally skit with me kinda failed to pull his punch and hit me in the mouth, breaking the tooth. Instead of evening meal that night, I had a root canal. ("Let's see if the nerve's exposed...")

Awesome.

The right one's been fine since forever, except a corner chipped off some years ago and efforts to bond a little replacement failed successively and progressively made it worse. So I finally went ahead and just had a crown put on it. Tooth was healthy, so no root canal. Except, it's always been a little sensitive after that.

For some reason, Covid ("Not COVID, Dude. Covid is the preferred nomenclature.") has dialed that sensitivity up to 11. Last night I was trying to figure out how to see the dentist while having COVID. I was asking Mitzi to run to the store for the stuff you rub on your gums to numb teeth.

I woke up this morning, and the tooth seemed to feel fine. Drank some water with the Paxlovid and learned it definitely was not. But it's either getting better, or I'm getting more accustomed to the pain. It isn't causing tears anymore, anyway. I'm hoping that as my immune system and the antiviral get a handle on this thing, it'll go back to being just a little sensitive. (I could still eat an ice cream bar, and have the BMI to prove it.)

Anyway, the beat goes on...

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:50 Wednesday, 25 September 2024

In my semi-sentient state, I listened to all three episodes of this podcast that Kottke linked to yesterday. It's from a year ago, but as history, it's timeless.

I was a 13-year-old environmentalist. I read The Population Bomb, The Limits to Growth, Future Shock and a bunch of other books about how technology and pollution were threatening our planet. One I can't recall was about the supersonic transport and the risk it posed to the ozone layer.

What I wasn't aware of back then was the guy who developed system dynamics, Jay Forrester. He developed Whirlwind at MIT, invented "core" memory ( genuinely useful randomly addressable memory), and thought deeply about systems.

Perhaps not as genuinely brilliant as someone like Claude Shannon, but I think his contributions equal Shannon's. Or they would have, had we paid attention.

Anyway, a lot of really good, interesting history in that podcast series. Easy to listen to, well produced and very sad.

The one piece of Apple II software I kept when I divested five years ago was Micro Dynamo. You can find very little to read about Micro Dynamo on the web. But it's a version of Dynamo, the modeling system developed for the world simulations in The Limits to Growth. There have been many modeling and simulation platforms developed since then.

Chaos theory added another important dimension to systems thinking, and we now have at least some understanding of complex non-linear dynamic systems, but I think the idea remains foreign to the vast majority of people. It should be a literacy requirement in a technological civilization, but we're probably not going to have one for very much longer, so that problem will solve itself.

As professions go, lawyers seem to get the most disrespect.

Should be economists.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:08 Wednesday, 25 September 2024