unraveling
30.Nov.2011
Thanks giving
Here's a good reason to be grateful:
it makes you healthier, and of course, happier. And you don't have
to address your gratitude to anyone in particular, Pascal's wager and
Fox
"News" notwithstanding. Just write down 5 things you're grateful
for, once a week, and rake in the optimism.
But maybe there's some bad news: you're not writing down the things that
annoy, are you? Even dwelling on
them might put a dent in your optimism, eh? Always keep
on the bright side of life.
Then maybe when you're strolling from stubble fields to brush and
Ponderosa pine on a place called Paradise Ridge, you'll come across a
turkey feather... on Thanksgiving day, and give a moment's thought to
deep gratitude, running wild and free and still alive.
27.Nov.2011
Losing touch with reality
David Frum's wondering whether his party is going to come up with a
less-crazy strategy than continuous slash and burn. The provocative
title for his NY Mag piece
(When
did the GOP lose touch with reality?) is not the question he's
looking to answer. His analysis is spot on, and the open question
(Will the GOP come to its senses?) is an important one.
Must-read.
There are enough good snippets to pull quote to get me in trouble with
RightHaven including a pretty accurate description of the "alternative
knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, [and] its own
laws of economics" the seems to drive the discourse on the right, but
I'll leave it at this:
"The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based
ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society. The
American system of government can't work if the two sides wage all-out
war upon each other: House, Senate, president, each has the power to
thwart the others. In prior generations, the system evolved norms and
habits to prevent this kind of stonewalling. For example: Theoretically,
the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet
nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this
just 'wasn't done.' In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically
could be done just 'weren't done.' Now old inhibitions have given way.
Things that weren't done suddenly are done.
"We can debate when the slide began. But what seems beyond argument is
that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more
dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. ..."
23.Nov.2011
The mob scene
Tuned in to a little bit of last night's GOP debate, number 11 now. If
there were highlights equal to previous runs, I didn't get lucky, but
only saw enough to gain a gestalt of sorts. One relative who paid
attention even more briefly than me asked me "who's that?" when Huntsman
had his moment. And, "I figure I'll just wait until they narrow it down
to one and then decide. There's just too many."
The lowlights: I'm pretty sure the totality of Ron Paul's positions are
anathema to me, although we agree on some things, and he does seem more
sincerely principled than the rest of the bunch. There's just that crazy
uncle down from the attic vibe that I can't get over. I think the sweet
spot of his opportunity came and went a couple of cycles ago.
And Rick Perry's still here, wha? Maybe he's hoping for another
turn like Gingrich is getting. The strutting about "worn the uniform"
and "been Commander in Chief" (of his state's National Guard don't you
know) is ever so slightly over-the-top, oh-so-Texan. Big hat, small
herd under there.
Rick Santorum sounded rational and nigh-on statesman-like for the moment
I saw, that was a surprise. Even Michele Bachmann made brief sense, and made
me wonder if we'd ever have a president with a nasal, upper midwest
twang like hers. Herman Cain spoke, but I can't remember anything about
what he said. Later, it occurred to me that he embodies the Peter
Principle. He has no idea what the discussion is about, really, but he
knows what sort of thing somebody in charge would say when called upon.
"If I were in charge, I'd do the things that somebody in charge
does."
Yesterday's front runner had the extra-puffed-up sense of himself that
he didn't really need and that creates an insufferable aura I can't get
through. Gingrich is a man with a lot of ideas bubbling up, and not as
much filter as he ought to have to keep the bad ones from coming out.
The second-guessing and deprecation of everything Obama has and hasn't
done seems like a pretty easy organ to pump, but the right-wing crowd
can't get enough of that. If Newt were in charge, the Iran problem would
be solved, lickety split. Complicated international security issues?
Never you mind.
Poor anybody-but is starting to seem a little peevish, probably
wondering if the parade of front-runner-of-the-week will ever stop.
Romney can not be happy about the second coming of Gingrich. He's
working the Obama-has-screwed-absolutely-everything-up trope for all
it's worth and then some, but his fatigue at sharing the stage with the
less worthy is starting to show.
And last but not least (except in the minds of everybody in the right
wing), Jon Huntsman impressed me with the skill of his quick thinking,
and ability to express complex and coherent thoughts without leaving any
verbal pauses that would lead him to be cut off or interrupted. (Half of
the group can't listen as fast as Hunstman talks, I'd guess.)
My good fortune included a chance to see Paul Wolfowitz out of the
woodwork, and formulating a question about foreign aid to Africa that
made Perry's simple-minded notion to just zero it all out seem, well,
simple-minded, but then we didn't need a question to do that,
really.
So, how many more of these to go before January? And will all 8 (did I
get that right, and get them all?) stay standing through the Christmas
season?
19.Nov.2011
The big business of education
"[W]hatever they're doing in Pennsylvania is definitely not working and
should not be replicated."
Devora Davis, CREDO research manager
An important (and long) piece by Lee Fang, in The Nation:
How
Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools. The motivation
is simple: "One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online
learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with
revenues reaching $24.4 billion." (Not to be confused with one of
the large corporations working to facilitate, and cash in on the
transformation, K12 Inc.) That kind of study gets a lot of
attention. These kinds, not so much:
"A recent study of virtual schools in Pennsylvania conducted by the
Center for Research on Education
Outcomes at Stanford University revealed that students in online
schools performed significantly worse than their traditional
counterparts. Another study, from the University of Colorado in December
2010, found that only 30 percent of virtual schools run by for-profit
organizations met the minimum progress standards outlined by No Child
Left Behind, compared with 54.9 percent of brick-and-mortar schools. For
White Hat Management, the politically connected Ohio for-profit
operating both traditional and virtual charter schools, the success rate
under NCLB was a mere 2 percent, while for schools run by K12 Inc., it
was 25 percent. A major review by the Education Department found that
policy reforms embracing online courses 'lack scientific evidence' of
their effectiveness."
The outcomes can be debated ad nauseum, long after the checks are cashed
and funds deposited. No doubt K12, News Corp., IQity and some of the
other players can djinn up some counter-studies to put some fair and
balanced confusion into the debate.
Also worth reading is Stephanie Mencimer's article in the Nov/Dec 2011
MotherJones,
Jeb Bush's Cyber Attack on Public Schools. It's far too soon for the
electorate to consider another Bush for President, but he's biding his
time, drumming up business and working to undermine unions along the
way, as "one of the nation's most prominent boosters of virtual
schools."
The profits help fund political campaigns for candidates sympathetic to
substituting technology for teachers, and the cycle feeds on
itself.
Explaining the inexplicable
Molly Ball takes a pretty good run at
what
GOP voters see in Newt Gingrich, something I'll admit is a deep and
abiding mystery to me, even if it's only abided for a week or so. And
with a flair:
"Gingrich, whose persona is multifarious, manages to embody the response
to all the the flawed contenders who preceded him. He has the
credentials Bachmann lacks. He's articulate, and then some, as Perry is
not. Unlike Cain, he's already been vetted—his baggage, though
ample, is already well known. As Garp says after watching a plane hit
the house he wants to buy in the movie version of The World According
to Garp: 'It's pre-disastered. We're safe here.'"
There are apparently some affable and charming elements to the man,
which haven't protruded from the condescending exterior that always
strikes me. And while rock star intellectual of the conservative base
may be the very thing to rouse a Lincoln Day dinner in Podunk, I haven't
seen a general (let alone Republican) clamoring for having more
intellectual in our leaders. The last Republican winner made a pretty
convincing study of anti-intellectual, in fact.
It seems unlikely to me that Newt can survive a couple weekly rounds of
Whack-a-Mole in the GOP fray, especially given the bundle he made from
Freddie Mac while the mortgage crisis exploded around him.
Explaining
that it didn't go to him, but rather, um, his (health care?!)
consulting firm does not exactly reinforce that smartest guy in the
room persona he imagines he has (before he shucks it off as
self-deprecation).
OWS: API for anarchy
That's my reading of
Alexis
Madrigal's deconstruction of Occupy Wall Street as an application
programming interface (briefly explained, for the non-nerds in the
audience). It reads as if he's got a breathless enthusiasm for the
movement, which I have yet to obtain myself. But plenty of of food for
thought in the components he describes. For example:
"GA/consensus-based decision-making: This form of group
deliberation has been a key differentiating component of the occupation.
Led by skilled facilitators, the entire group can engage in debate about
what courses of action to take."
As noted, "consensus-based decision-making is not some newfangled idea,
but has been developed for years." It can work really well in some
situations, and be utterly ineffectual in others. Not the least of
important factors is the skill of said facilitators, and the
participants having (or finding) some shared purpose. A useful
shared purpose matters, too. Plain old obstruction is so easy a
Congressman (or woman) can do it, even in an old-fashioned leaderful
context. Consensus-based, leaderless decision-making is a brilliant
tool for obstruction if that's what you're after.
Heads they win, tails we lose
Thomas Edsall,
Capitalizing
on the Collapse: "The key political factor is that the
cuts go into effect after the 2012 election."
The Republicans are banking on the Intrade odds for their winning
control of both
the House
and the
Senate... after which, what, we get to try more cutting taxes
(faster than) cutting government and partisan obstructionary combat?
A central Democratic player in the supercommittee negotiations
noted that "there is a lot of fear" that the failure of the
supercommittee "is intentional, that the Republicans are waiting
until January, 2013, after an election has taken place. Who is
in control will have enormous consequence."
Whereas the Democrats' upside for impasse is that it may lead to the
Bush era tax cuts expiring (as they were originally legislated to do,
and then re-legislated to do a bit later than the original
schedule).
Crazy world. And hats off to the founding duplicity in those
"temporary" tax cuts, so instrumental to the exploding deficits
their authors profess to hate so deeply!
My sense of history is that the Republicans will do better at beating
obstruction than the Democrats have done, because they're more ruthless
and have simpler and more selfish goals.
Never,
ever raise taxes is such a simple and compelling ideology that it
matters not that three quarters of the populace accepts that a deficit
reduction plan should include tax increases. In the battle between
cortex and lizard
brain, lizard wins.
17.Nov.2011
Happy birthday, Gorge!
The Columbia River Gorge has been under construction for 12 or 14
million years, but things really got going when
the Missoula
Floods hit, a mere 14,000 years ago, give or take. Still wet behind
the ears, the Gorge's
National
Scenic Act turns 25 today, the only standalone environmental law
signed by President Ronald Reagan. In commemoration, OPB's Oregon
Field Guide will
feature The
Fight for Paradise, "a look back at [the Act's] dual mandate of
protection and economic development." Check your local listings. (Mine
show Idaho behind the times, what else is new? They're showing OFG #2306
a month from tomorrow, maybe this episode #2307 will arrive on
Christmas.)
If you're in
Portland or
Hood River,
you can join a Birthday Bash. Otherwise, enjoy OPB's
CRG
slideshow or the links to the half-dozen photogs' websites they
provide. I've got
a few pictures of my own,
but they're more about the river traffic than the non-stop, 4-season
scenic beauty. I started sailing on the Columbia just before the
Act was passed. Whether you're sailing or
sightseeing,
it's an amazing place to visit.
Update: OPB now has
the video
online.
14.Nov.2011
Something stinks at dinner
James
Oliphant's report for the L.A. Times of a gobsmacking breach
of ethics on the part of 22% of the Supreme Court justices appears to
have a significant typo. Surely the correct word in the first paragraph
should be fetid rather than feted. Allow me:
"The day the Supreme Court gathered behind closed doors to consider the
politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to
President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia
and Clarence Thomas, were [fetid] at a dinner sponsored by the
law firm that will argue the case before the high court."
Incredibly, the Code of Conduct that applies to "lower" federal judges
does not apply to the Supreme Court's justices. How did that ever make
sense to anyone? And more importantly, when does the impeachment get
under way?
"This stunning breach of ethics and indifference to the code belies
claims by several justices that the court abides by the same rules that
apply to all other federal judges," said Bob Edgar, the president of
Common Cause. "The justices were wining and dining at a black-tie
fundraiser with attorneys who have pending cases before the court. Their
appearance and assistance in fundraising for this event undercuts any
claims of impartiality, and is unacceptable."
Speaking of unwise uses of Facebook
Conspiring
to commit a class I felony and risking up to a $10,000 fine and
three-and-a-half years in jail seems like a stupid thing to document in
your social media account. But then hatching a plot to subvert the
democratic process to spite people whose politics you disagree with is
not that bright an idea to begin with.
I got all this stuff twirlin' 'roun' in my head too, Herman
How do these things happen? How does someone as
demonstrably,
and utterly incapable of managing an interview let alone a
subcommittee get to be the front-runner for Republican nominee for the
President of the United States? Does the party really have such deep
contempt for the political process? People have donated millions of
dollars to this man's campaign. What in the hell are they
thinking?
Mr. Luna goes to Washington (again)
During his recent self-promotion tour in D.C., Tom Luna found
sympathetic staffer Rob Bluey at the Heritage Foundation to give him
another 5 minutes and 36 seconds of fame, to celebrate Idaho's
sweeping
education reform.
What a shame his many opponents didn't produce the "fanfare" that people
in Wisconsin and Ohio did, attempting instead to participate in the
democratic process. (Only to be utterly ignored at pretty much every
step of the way. The Idaho Legislature's motto: "we don't have to
listen, actually.")
The interviewlet starts with a recitation of all the woe that's come
Luna's way for what he's trying to do: "your truck vandalized, your
tires slashed" (one incident with no suspects ever identified, but it
sounds worse in two phrases, doesn't it?) "you even had an opponent show
up at your mother's house. What prompted all this outrage?"
Kind of exciting to imagine for a moment with the pause button on, how
would Mr. Luna answer this question? Is he capable of looking at things
from others' point of view, and imagining what it's like to be lied to,
to have a politician win re-election and then do a surprise U-turn and
introduce sweeping legislation that threatens the livelihoods of
thousands and the work of their lives? Of course, he thinks he's doing
the right thing, and everyone opposed...
"Well, we're talking about the most comprehensive education reform that
has happened in Idaho, and across the nation in decades. That drives a
lot of passion..."
What reforms has he [sic] put in place? [sic]
"We've completely reformed the way we manage our labor force in our
schools at the local level ... we've implemented a statewide pay for
performance plan ..."
This comes as news back home in Podunk, where the legislated pay for
performance has passed, yes, but is actually yet to be funded. So
"implemented" in a manner of speaking. A misleading manner, to be as
charitable as possible. Rob Bluey was eagerly lapping it up.
"And then a heavy dose of technology. ... A focus on bringing more on-line
learning..."
If you can call a requirement for two, count 'em, two online courses for
high school graduation a "focus." (And innovation? We're all over
innovation! Students can keep taking the same course,
play
'till you win and the state keeps putting quarters in the machine
for you.)
But two online courses is still two more than the vast majority of
concerned citizens who commented on the plan thought should be required.
Listening to public opinion is not Tom Luna's strong suit, however.
After Bluey dismissively encapsulates the entire outpouring of
unprecendented public opposition in Wisconsin and Ohio as nothing more
than a "media circus," he wants to know how Idaho's brilliant leader
avoided even that distraction?
Luna did note that "thousands of people [did] march on the Capitol, and
we had student walkouts and we had vandalism, and things like that."
Like that? What like that? There was that
one incident with your car, which you were very eager to promote as
union thuggery in spite of there being not one shred of evidence to
support the slander. Luna's answer is that we "flew under the radar"
(or "slid under," maybe).
Finally, Bluey gets to Luna's "experience" in education, highlighting
what precious little there is to tell:
"Now you've served on a school board, you've also spent time here in
Washington at the U.S. Department of Education..."
The question is not, "how could such limited experience in the actual
field of education qualify you to be the Superintendent of Public
Instruction for the whole state?!" but rather this juicy softball:
"What did those experiences teach you about education in America?"
He imagines himself in the vanguard (just as the Heritage Foundation
imagines itself), leading a "very comprehensive" charge that will
magically make our education system more flexible and able to do more
with less. God love 'em, it's a beautiful dream. Not tethered to reality
in any way, but don't be such a downer, would you?
13.Nov.2011
Here's looking at you, kid
Technology racing into sci-fi territory with
face
recognition ability. How about... a billboard that looks at you to
determine which designer drug to try to sell you?
Or 50 bars in Chicago participating in a system that identifies and
reports "the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women,"
without ahem identifying specific patrons? In what they
post. So far.
Calling the spread of this technology "the democratization of
surveillance" is an interesting choice of words, given that
undemocratic surveillance has always (and presumably will always)
eagerly adopt the most powerful possible means. But a more relevant
question might be whether Facebook's photo tagging hasn't already
launched an invasion force, "millions of people are using it to add
hundreds of millions of tags."
Except since Facebook has hundreds of millions of users, we must
be talking about billions of tags already.
12.Nov.2011
Arizona recalls president of its Senate
Big
news from down south,
"the first sitting Senate president in the nation and the first Arizona
legislator ever to lose a recall election," set to be
out of his job on Nov. 21.
The central issue of the recall was
"a more humane and moderate approach to the immigration issue," and gave
Russell Pearce, one of the prime movers of the state's divisive
anti-immigration law his walking papers.
The winner, Jerry Lewis, ran a "high road" campaign, eschewed gifts and
favors, and... didn't try to get a Mexican immigrant 3rd candidate on
the ballot to improve his changes, the way Pearce's supporters did.
Read any good articles lately?
If you're wired into the
WaPo Social
Reader, and we're friends on Facebook, I wouldn't have to ask. Not
sure how they convinced you that would be a cool thing, but
"Once you're using the app, the stories you read will be instantly
shared with your friends, and your friends' reads will be shared with
you, creating a socially powered newswire of intriguing articles."
And not-so-intriguing articles. And OMG, you read that
article?!
The only sort of Facebook app that's not inherently evil is one that makes
it exactly clear what you're sharing, to whom, and does
nothing unless you explicitly opt-in, each time. For my money. Social
Reader fails, hugely. The best-case scenario for automatically
posting everything you read to your profile is that it's only
annoying.
Comedy gold (just a shame the joke's on us
Not sure who those colored icons were, but they and/or their editor put
together
a
very entertaining sidebar to the Michigan debate
that is what a Twitter stream only wishes it could be. (No 140 character
limit. No hash and @ tags. Complete, well-written sentences.)
W.W.: Let's right-size everything. Some things are too small. Other
things are too big. But everything should be just right!
J.F.: It's the Three Bears Plan!
W.W.: Exactly.
It was a target-rich environment, of course, and not just for the
now-famous lacuna in Rick Perry's brain. Some items from the highlight
reel:
R.A.:
Should a candidate with serious issues with sexual harassment really
call the highest ranked elected woman in America's history, "Princess
Nancy"?
W.W.: Newt basically keeps saying that there's no point in his
appearing in these debates because he is unable to say anything
worthwhile in the allotted time. The moderators ought to take the hint
and stop asking him anything.
J.F. : Newt's undisciplined hostility is one of the true
pleasures of these debates. It's like someone poured vinegar and baking
soda into his brain and stuff just bubbles up furiously.
Big h/t to Sharon Fisher's G+ stream for the link.
2011.11.11
The final frontier
Looking into the night sky, our eyes are inadequate instruments. As
curiosity has driven us, and science enabled us, we've seen more, and
more, and still more, from looking into the "void." The finest
instrument we've made to date is the Hubble Space Telescope, and the
second most audacious 10 days of its observing time were spent in 1996,
pointed at "a part of the sky that seemed utterly empty, a patch devoid
of any planets, stars and galaxies." That was
the Deep Field experiment, which found the 13 billion year-old photons
from three thousand galaxies, hundreds of trillions
of stars.
In 2004, the most audacious, "the farthest we've ever seen into the
universe." Get yourself a good connection to the intertubes, a big
screen and good speakers, sit back and spend 4 minutes and 17 seconds to
have a look at
the Hubble
Ultra Deep Field 3D. (Either wait for it to buffer fully, or take
their offer and download the 200MB (!) .mov to optimize the experience;
make your first viewing the best one. Trust me.)
It's a beautiful piece of science, art, and interpretation. I love what
the choice of music adds to it, given that experiencing the underlying
meaning goes far beyond what words can contain. But since words are part
of our experience now, let me rewrite the penultimate paragraph (and
quote the last one) with slightly less distracting hamminess:
There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Simply saying that
number doesn't connect us to the ultimate reality because a
number—an incomprehensibly large number—does not give us any
way to actually experience the context it represents. This image
however, and the understanding of how it was constructed, can bring us
face to face with an astounding realization about the universe we
inhabit.
We pointed the most powerful telescope ever built by human beings at
absolutely nothing, for no other reason than because we were curious,
and discovered that we occupy a very tiny place in the heavens.
A huge hat tip goes out to Tony Darnell for his
Deep Astronomy blog.
2011.11.10
Let's debate again in 1, 2, ...
Nothing spells "teh crazy" like another all-hands on deck Republican
presidential debate, and no one matches
Gail
Collins in deconstructive panache. You remember that famous
software product with the numbers in boxes and the formulas, don't you?
Lotus 1, 2, .... um, what comes next?
"If only he'd written them on his wrist."
ENERGY! Because gosh, Texas has a lot of oil and Rick Perry's tank is
always full, even if his escalator doesn't go very far past menswear.
"Pity the Republican voters. They aren't asking for much. They just want
a candidate who's really conservative but not totally crazy. Who has
verbs in his sentences. Who didn't drive to Canada with the family dog
strapped to the roof of the car."
Hard to believe whack-o-ness has really run its course, but the off-year
election results did make it look like it's at least running out of
steam.
9.Nov.2011
Recycling pays off
I don't know if it's really "state of the art," but the current City of
Boise trash collection and recycling is convenient and cheap enough.
We rent two, 65 gallon wheelie bins, one for a
list
of recyclable materials and one for our flat-out refuse. That gives
us the lowest possible $12.80/mo. rate.
The "standard" size bins are almost 50% bigger, 95 gal., and you only
have to pay $1 more per month for that much more collection. The basic
infrastructure and collection process (including one-man trucks with
bin-handling mechanics) is the expensive part; maybe the incremental
cost multiplier is only 1/6. (For non-mechanical handling,
limited to 32 gal. cans, and bundles of branches, you get 5 "free"
overflow stickers per year... and can buy more for $1 each. So $12 for
1,560 gal. more garbage/yr in the big bin... or more than $40 if you
have to pay for that much overflow. The
leaves are free if your trees now to let them go in the month of
November, which our oak and sycamore resolutely do not.)
The recycling is dead simple on our end (that, and the almost 30%
discount in the monthly rate accounts for a high participation rate):
dump all the paper, cardboard, cans, qualifying plastic into one big
bin. Not sure how its economical to sort all that stuff out into
separate streams, but apparently economical enough for a surprise
holiday bonus in the Nov/Dec bill: a one-time $3
"Recycling
Award" kickback from Republic Services (fka Allied Waste
Services).
Not sure why they get to keep the other 3/4ths of the money they're
making on recycling, but I suppose it's in the contract somewhere.
Anyway, it's a coffee and donut from the recycling man. w00t.
8.Nov.2011
Election Day (Fourfer)
We didn't go vote first thing this morning, because we voted last week.
Because the county early voting place was right next door to the county
driver's license renewing place, and somebody looking at Jeanette's D.L.
had said "hey, this is expired," and I thought I should check mine and
"hey, this is expired" too. Just about exactly eight years since I
renewed, a couple months late in 2003.
Then a few days later, the Boise Public Library! sent me an email,
telling me my library card is due for its "annual address verification."
Not that big a deal to "please be prepared to show proof of your current
residence to a staff member during your next visit to the Library,"
even though we've lived here 27 years, thanks, pay our utility bills
monthly, property taxes annually, and Jeanette volunteers at the library
weekly, like clockwork. And besides, when we're there, they can
go ahead and ask, we don't really need advance notice.
But for your driver's license, it would be nice get a heads-up once
every 4 or 8 years, yeah. Just an idea.
Twitter verse
didn't see the birds
after seeds
in November's garden, shattering.
just the black cat on point
tensed tail, straight
she looked like a comma
then
Exclamation!
I'm still looking for a reason to pay much attention to the
so-called twitterverse. I've collected 6 followers who didn't know any
better than to suppose I'd have something to tweet once in a while, but
I don't seem to. Those things are so short. And ephemeral. Why
bother? They're like facebook, only less interesting. I guess you need
one of them phone thingies.
The ones that are interesting seem mostly to be leads; canonicaly
cryptic, but OK, there's an art to getting it done in 140 characters
(minus a few for @s and #tags). Seems like a game of "Made you look";
vaguely annoying. I've spent more than a decade blogging with the
self-imposed goal to either (a) write something worthwhile on its own
merits, or (b) link to useful (or at funny, or something) content, and
add my own two cents to make it moreso. Yeah I miss a few (zillion)
things because that bar's too high, but oh well.
When I went to get coffee just now, I saw this scene in our frosty,
dying, but still lively garden, paused for the tense moments while it
played out, and then thought, here's something charming for Twitter!
Having typed it in, revised, revised, revised (noting that it was
counting linefeeds, but letting me put them in) and [Tweet], I was
disappointed to see that it mangled my lines.
So forget poetry there.
Well, it was worth some more editing anyway, and I've got it all wrong,
I know. It's about that question: What's happening? Always, ever,
right now, what's happening? Could be phatic, or you could have a
meaningful answer once in a while. As phatic, my default answer is
"everything."
Otherwise, well, we'll see if it turns out to be worth saying more
about.
Update: two new followers this morning! Both Spamtweeters, how
nice (NOT) that every medium has its vermin.
4.Nov.2011
The incredible shrinking Herman Cain
John Harris of Politco, on
tonight's Washington Week, summing up Herman "Koch bruthas'
brutha from anotha mutha" Cain's and his campaign's reaction to the
story of the week:
"There's no reason to mince words: what we saw in the response... is
incompetence."
Politico gave Cain a heads-up 10 days before breaking the story.
So never mind how he's going to respond to the 3am phone call: how's he
going to respond to the week and a half advance notice?
I saw Cain talking to Judy Woodruff
on the Newshour Monday night, with the cock-and-bull story
about how maybe it was that time he said the gal was the same height as
his wife and she might've misunderstood... but no. The full-on details
are still tucked in the confidential settlements, but one lawyer's got
enough to seal the deal:
...a "series of inappropriate behaviors and unwanted advances" toward
his client over two months in the 1990s ... the accusations did not
center on a single exchange that could be easily misinterpreted[; he]
said there were multiple episodes that led his client to file a formal,
"written complaint in 1999 against him specifically and it had very
specific instances in it, and if he chooses not to remember or to
acknowledge those, that's his issue."
1.11.11
2 minutes and 1 second of must-see TV
Dam! And then NOT-dam! Fabulous editing of the visual record of the
removal
of the Condit dam from the White Salmon River. Andy Maser of Maser
Films has more coming, documenting the new life of an old river.
Unlike the Elwha Dam on the Olympic Peninsula, this is not a slow and
careful deconstruction:
"PacifiCorp, the utility that owns the site, had estimated the lake
would drain in about six hours, but Maser tells us that it actually
emptied in less than two."
Will you pay $249 to fall in love with a thermostat?
Sorry to spoil the punchline for
Steven
Levy's gushing puff piece about Tony Fadell's must-have accessory
for the home nest (or Nest Home, as the case may be), but "how much will
it cost?" is kind of an important question for most people who didn't
leave their last job as VP to take a year off with the family in
Paris.
Not that an iconic household appliance looking disturbingly like the
ubiquitous red eye of HAL in Stanley Kubrik's sci-fi nightmare couldn't
be a "must have" accessory for digerati brought up on whizzy gadgets,
but two-and-a-half hundred for a thermostat? (Even if it can do other
colors.)
No, that isn't five times what you'd pay for the mid-20th century
Honeywell "Round" from the legendary Henry Dreyfus, it's
ten times as much. (If Dreyfus has persuaded you that thermostats
are supposed to be round, you can however spend 1/5th the price of a
Nest Learning
Thermostat for an
Easy-To-See
version
of the Round.)
After making do with a bimetalic strip and vial of mercury in a
"rectangular" for 25 years (on top of the 20 it had served before we
bought the place), we spent all of $30 on a programmable thermostat 3
years ago, and while its user interface leaves plenty to be desired,
it gets the job done nicely, and when we want more of what it offers, we
just press its little button and more comes out.
I love the idea of attention to detail, and a beautiful user interface,
something that learns what you like and anticipates what you need (even
as I reserve some skepticism about their ability to actually make that work
in a household with more than one person in it), and I have a mechanical
engineer's affection for HVAC, just as I don't mind the idea of
"checking out some dirty spot in the basement to fix something." (She
said that like it was a bad thing! "Crawl space" is a bad thing,
basements are fine.)
But our home energy bill runs about
a third of the government's estimate of the average home
($2,200 according to Levy's report), and half of what we do spend is not
"under the control of the thermostat" in the sense that if only
our thermostat were smarter, we could reduce our energy use by 25%.
(Especially not after we already did reduce our energy use by about that
much by replacing our 1960s-vintage natural gas thermostat with a
high-efficiency condensing furnace 2 years ago.)
I wish Tony and his sexy thermostat all the best, and I hope his ideas
catch on. There are a lot of savings to be had in home energy
use, even if making it happen doesn't turn out to be "as much fun as
shuffling an iTunes playlist." There's only so much fun you can have
with a thermostat, after all. (Now if it did actually shuffle your
iTunes playlist, that might be something.)
Thanks to whomever you are
Speaking of time passing, the webhost just notified me that I've
been billed for another 12 months, which will make an even dozen years
that I've (somewhat inexplicably) owned this here fortboise.org.
On the invoice, I see someone signed up at
WestHost
and gave me a referral credit, $25 off. That's nice.
I'm certainly not in the business of making referrals, but I will
say that if you're looking for a webhost, I'm happy to recommend the one
I use (whether or not you "mention my name" at whatever moment in the
process that has to happen) as being reasonably priced, reasonably
responsive, and most of all, not having done anything to drive me away.
For 11 years now. Good on 'em.
I haven't made any attempt to keep my
webhost shopping comparison chart
updated, but it might be an interesting historical document some day,
from back when an account was parceled out a measly 25MB and one had to
give a thought to how many images to put up. (The hosting plans start
at 50GB now, 2,000X the space. Somehow I'm grandfathered in at a
lower quota, "only" 25.7GB. Since I'm only using 2% of that, I'm not
complaining.)
New day, old year
We were up early on Sunday, a literal dark-thirty. When I went out to
get the paper, the sky to the west gave no hint of morning. Orion
sparkled high in the southwest, Jupiter was setting, bright in
opposition. Off early to a choir rehearsal, followed by two
performances for Sunday church and a(n early) celebration of
Día de los Muertos.
At the first service, my chair just happened to be in the sun coming
through the transom window above one of the east doors, and blinds that
are usually drawn had been left open. It was dazzling, but there was
nothing I needed to look at while sitting there, so I just closed my
eyes and enjoyed the sensation, even moreso when listening to Amado
Nervo's poem,
En Paz
(At
Peace), and its satisfied ending:
Amé, fui amado, el sol acarició mi faz.
¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!
It's a poem about evening rather than morning, but we straddle all our
days, sometimes feeling eternal May even in late October.
I loved, I was loved, the sun caressed my face
Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Saturday, 03-Dec-2011 10:01:13 MST
http://fortboise.org/blog/201111.html
