Leap Up, Fall Down – the Daylight Savings Scam
Medford, Oregon – Daylight Savies Day, 2017 — Before I share my handy tip with you, I gotta say that in my opinion, William Willett has a lot to answer for, because best I can tell he was the scurvy dog — not Benjamin Franklin — who actually “invented” what is now Daylight Savings Time. Or maybe I should say he was the scurvy dog who unleashed the Daylight Savings Scam upon an unsuspecting populace.
‘Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.’ — Indian Saying
Ain’t it just the truth!
And right here, right now I want to put to rest the scurrilous rumors that [Read more…]
“Astro-Turfing” – How Media Manipulates Us with Fake Information
Medford, Oregon and TED Talk, October 28, 2017 — Surprising information —
- 90% of news media are controlled by six corporations. As a result,much of what you read and see can be an orchestrated story created by special interest groups
- “Astro-Turf” means to falsify fake news, fake “information” so it appears to be a grass-roots movement. (IE: “fake grass”)
- Alas, Wikipedia is often hijacked, because pages can be controlled by anonymous editors on behalf of special interests who reverse edits that go against their hidden agenda
Those of you who know me may remember that I’m not big on conspiracy theories because I think (a) humans do poorly at keeping a secret, and because (b) humans are poor at concerted action. Few events, however dreadful, require explanation of a wide conspiracy, when simple greed will suffice as explanation.
And I think that simple greed may be operating here, because …
Special interests have permeated our government, and with the weakening of newspaper revenues their journalistic integrity has slipped. Yesterday in conversation with a friend who once ran a department at the New York Times I heard confirmation that media’s ability to generate accurate original reporting is far less than what it once was.
An Eye-Opening Article about How We Are Tricked
Here is an eye-opening article which seems sound, spelling out how [Read more…]
Why Time Exists
An Implosion of Life and Love
Medford, Oregon June 27, 2015 — Since she lost her vision, Susan has remained stand-offish, edgy, sometimes crying alone in her room. Coming to terms, but it’s hard. She doesn’t want comforting from me. Doesn’t want to be touched or held. Sometimes friendly; sometimes not exactly.
A few weeks ago near the beginning of the month, at the table she said we need to talk. You never really want to hear those words.
The story, made simple, is this: She said she didn’t want to be in a relationship any more. She says she feels like a different person. She says she finds it uncomfortable living in this house with me, as she doesn’t feel she has enough space of her own. I am “too big a personality.” I think that means too noisy, when I’m talking on the phone with clients, always present in the house for I work here. She says it’s too much for her current state of mind.
She’s going to move out just before July first. She’s paid her share of rent for June. Her daughter Saradevi has offered that Susan can live with her, and she’s going. Oddly, Saradevi has recently moved to the teeny-tiny town of Caspar, near Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast, in a tiny house out in the middle of nowhere.
Since Susan’s catastrophe, which wiped out her artist work and her bookselling business, I have been focusing on my work, to get more clients and income, thinking how to increase our income, for she cannot work and her social-security check is small. But now it seems that’s not to matter much. I love her as intensely as ever. But she doesn’t want me to take care of her.
My belief up to this point was that we would spend the rest of our lives together.
And now, the plan has changed. [Read more…]
Which is Alive? The Singer or the Song?
Medford, Oregon, May 2, 2015 — Now that I live on Siskiyou Boulevard, next door is a sometime fiesta. That is to say, the Latino family next door has the house on the corner, and apparently a never-ending extended family and circle of friends. So often on a Friday evening there is a gathering with Spanish music and beer. And when one of the children has a birthday … oh, my.
So when I returned from an errand this afternoon, and saw an inflatable tent thing in which children can bounce and fly around, I recognized birthday in progress. Sure enough, around dark, headlights and cars arrived, families spilled out into the pools of light, and now as I go to bed there’s a wonderful party going on next door.
It’s summer, and I have the window open beside my bed, so I can enjoy the party almost as well as if I was there. Past my window, in their back yard, children run, and scream, and yell stories, accusations, laughter, curse words, and insults. In other words, they’re having a good time.
You might think this would disturb my sleep, but it doesn’t. Somehow I like it, and despite the startling loudness and excitement, it’s pleasant and soothing.
I drifted off, smiling, and then … [Read more…]
The Golden Words, Opium, and my dog Charlie
The big vacant lot, Weed, California, July 4, 2008: I was walking with my dogs, and I got to talking to my dog Charlie, who is young and impulsive. He’s a great listener. I can say any kind of nonsense and he’s still interested.
But I was talking to Charlie and I asked him if he liked poetry. He didn’t answer, being a dog, and I asked him if he like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He didn’t answer that either.
But it got me to musing about that story. Do you remember how Coleridge was an opium smoker?
Well, he was.
And there he was, high as a kite, and in his mind’s eye he saw this really swell poem, and he went to write it down. It’s really quite wonderful. Has several paragraphs, and the first one goes like this …
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
But at that moment, a guy to whom Coleridge owed money came banging on the door! Interrupted our Samuel, and that was the end of the swell poem.
Bummer.
And while I was walking along with Charlie, who ran to chase some birds, I was thinking how we’re all searching for the … Golden Words.
The Golden Words that will bring us the love of our life. The Golden Words that will banish all our fears forever. The Golden Words that will magically unlock the riches of the internet.
Kind of like ‘Open, Sesame,’ for Ali Baba.
But when the currents of life toss you about, you know how often the quest for these Golden Words can toss us right in among the Forty Theives!
Oh, gosh, it can be confusing.
I’ve felt completely flabbergasted sometimes. Not because there’s any shortage of information. In fact, there’s too much!
There’s gems and glimmering gold all around us, as we go through life, but it’s like glimpsing a treasure while everyone around you is yelling.
Don’t you sometimes wish for something just simple and clear?
Something just simple?
Something clear?
Unlike Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seems like it’s just swell to be clear-headed, and sometimes I think that maintaining a good sense of balance, a feeling of calm, and a clear vision may be the entire trick to living a wonderful life.
And if, sometimes, we’re all searching for the Golden Words … well, there’s a little artist in all of us.
Law 23 of Project Design: Successive Refinement
San Francisco, 1976: I got my first computer! It was a high-class Cromemco, in a kit, and had a lightning fast Z80 processor that ran at (gasp) 3 megahertz, and a full 64K of memory.
I had a buddy who knew computers in and out — he wrote code for our satellites to determine whether a field in russia had wheat or alfalfa — and he put the kit together for me, cause I didn’t know how to solder back then. (He’s rich and retired long since, because he went to work for a new startup called Cisco, and they gave stock options; but that’s another story.)
He also gave me a book about beginning to program in Basic.
It showed a simple technique called ‘successive refinement.’ If you are a programmer then you know this technique but for non-programmers here, it’s really simple. And mongo useful.
Here’s how it works …
You first state what the program is to do, in one sentence:
“Manage a mailing list”
Then you refine that, as precisely as possible, still in ordinary words —
“manage a mailing list
input of an address
finding an address
editing an address
sorting the addresses
printout of the addresses
printing addresses on envelopes
printing addresses on labels
And then in similar manner you break these down. Pretty soon you discover that stating what it’s to do starts to look like code, eg:
“bubblesort( addresslistname, ascending )”
After a while it’s all code, and it will have these virtues —
(a) It’s structure will seem logical to a human
(b) therefore it’s easier to debug and later modify
(c) you tend to avoid can-of-worms code that goes everywhere
Now, and here’s my point, what’s really lovely is that this approach will work fairly well for most any project of any kind.
Successive refinement.
With this, you can become … refined. Cool.
Go Thee Forth and Prosper!