Category Archives: GeekWorld

GeekWorld

PKM: Personal Knowledge Management (Isn’t that terrible?) I found it in an article.

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Lughnasa                                                   Lughnasa Moon

Content curation. This will be a quick one because I’m going to have to devote some time to this to get anything from it. Isn’t that always what happens?

Here are a few takeaways from four articles I read about this relatively recent activity.

1. Define what it is you want in your information stream.

2. Find sources for it and use one or more of several curation oriented programs to help you aggregate them.

3. Create your own compilation of materials according to the thematic decisions made in #1.

4. Comment on, critique, summarize.

5. Repeat

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel

Green Day

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Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

Out this morning to harvest collard greens and chard. Kate’s going to use the pressure 500P1030729cooker to can them so we can move them with us next year.  A few more garlic should be ready and perhaps more onions.

We’ll have a year without a garden, most likely, next year. If we can get out of here by April, not impossible, we might land in Colorado soon enough to get raised beds made, new soil in place, and a 2015 garden in. Remains to be seen.

(collard greens and chard + onions in May)

Today is Lughnasa and that post will come, appropriately, after I bring in the greens. August means the downside of the summer has well begun as my round calendar tells me graphically at a quick glance.

There will be today, too, a post on what the web calls content curation. I was not the first sun calendarto think of that term relative to the information firehose analogy. There are several strategies for curating content, but the first and most basic one is to know what kind of information you want. I’ve made baby steps in this direction with Feedly, the links listed on the right here, bookmarks and an uneven deployment of hashtags.

(note: we are at about :20 to the hour if this were a wall clock)

But more on Lughnasa and content curation later today.

 

Commentary on the news, GeekWorld

Streaming

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Summer                                                                          Lughnasa Moon

Turning up the nozzle on the firehose. I read three newspapers daily: the NYT, the Denver Post and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In addition I read several magazine articles a day, many from the New York Review of Books, but many from other sources discovered through web-site aggregators. The one I currently use is called Feedly. Wired and Foreign Policy are the two other paper magazine subscriptions I have, only recently having canceled my long-time subscription to the Economist.  I’m also always reading at least one book on my Kindle, sometimes two.

We live in the golden age of science fiction television shows, as I said a while back, but we also live in the golden age of information access. The plethora of good science fiction means some get missed; the plethora of information available has created a perverse problem geometrically more complex than the science fiction one.

On Feedly I have eight categories of websites: stuff, technology, politics, science, magazines (the information aggregrators of the 20th century), philosophy and climate change. I could have double that with no difficulty. Feedly allows me to quickly browse topics and articles to see if there’s something I want to read.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I could spend all day, every day, simply staying abreast of the things I care about. Obviously, this is a problem. It leaves no room for action, no room for work or domestic life. I can only absorb information at some finite rate, whatever that rate is. And I can only absorb, retain and understand an even smaller amount.

This leads obviously to a need to curate (overused, I know, but apt here) information sources and within them categories of information. How do I do that? Frankly, I have no good solutions. I’m often left at some point during the day deciding to quit reading to do something else: Latin, garden, pack, write my own information to add to the flood, think. But when I decide to quit it’s because there is always more, and more easily available. I don’t have to wait a month for a magazine to come, or a day for a newspaper to come. I don’t rely on hourly news digests by radio nor any of the various TV news broadcasts. These latter two are far too broad and shallow for my tastes.

This needs a solution, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

 

 

 

GeekWorld, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Mudslides, sinkholes and…craters?

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Summer                                                               New (Lughnasa) Moon

 

Russian scientists say they believe a 60-meter (66-yard) wide crater discovered recently in far northern Siberia could be the result of changing temperatures in the region.  Andrei Plekhanov, a senior researcher at the Scientific Research Center of the Arctic, told the AP Thursday that the crater was mostly likely the result of a “build-up of excessive pressure” underground due to rising temperatures in the region.

Plekhanov on Wednesday traveled to the crater, some 30 kilometers (18.64 miles) from the Bovanenkovo gas field in the far northern Yamal peninsula. He said 80 percent of the crater appeared to be made up of ice and that there were no traces of an explosion, eliminating the possibility that a meteorite had struck the region.

Read more : http://www.geologypage.com/2014/07/66-yard-crater-appears-in-far-northern.html#ixzz38V5KlWeU
Follow us: @geologypage on Twitter | geology.page on Facebook

 

Anoka County, GeekWorld, Our Land and Home

Itchy Palm? Too much odonatology?

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Summer                                                                  Most Heat Moon

The dragonfly came up in conversation yesterday because I saw one outside the window at Running Aces and remarked I’d read they hadn’t changed in 300,000,000 years. A remarkable fact to me and one I confirmed in some quick internet research this morning.

Tom then added that they were unique in their ability to vector their prey, that is, calculate the prey’s path and their own so they would intersect. All other apex predators chase their prey. Very interesting. (see video below)

A little more poking around found a few more interesting facts about the dragonfly, but I put the most remarkable one (to me) last.

 

 

1. The study of dragonflies, and sometimes damselflies, is called Odonatology. Dragonflies are referred to as Odonates.

2. About 5000 species of dragonflies and damselflies are known

3. Top speed for a dragonfly is between 30 and 60 km/h (19 to 38 m.p.h.)

4. A dragonfly needs warmth to fly and you will notice they will often land when
the sun goes behind a cloud.

5. Because of their compound eyes, dragonflies can see in many directions at once

6. Fact: They Calculate Velocity For A Perfect Kill

The dynamics of capturing an object in mid-air are staggeringly complex, so much so that it’s usually something that’s only done by animals with complex nervous systems, like seagulls, or humans. To intercept something moving with its own velocity, you have to be able to predict where it will be in the future. When researchers began studying dragonflies in 1999, they found that rather than “track” their prey—follow it through the air until they caught up with it—they would actually intercept it. In other words, dragonflies ensure a kill by flying to where their prey is going to be.

That indicates that dragonflies calculate three things during a hunt: the distance of their prey, the direction it’s moving, and the speed it’s flying. In the space of milliseconds, the dragonfly calculates its angle of approach and, like a horror movie monster, it’s already waiting while the hapless fly stumbles right into its clutches.

7. Most of a dragonfly’s life is spent in the naiad form beneath the water’s surface…They breathe through gills in their rectum, and can rapidly propel themselves by suddenly expelling water through the anus.[6

Colorado, GeekWorld, The Move

Foregrounded

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Summer                                                 Most Heat Moon

With Jon and Ruth here, the last realtor coming tonight and the 2nd Wind people coming to remove the Vectra and the leg press in a few minutes, the move has been pushed radically into the foreground, right here with daily life. We’re living the move almost all the hours of the day. (This needs slowing down, which will happen when three generations of Olsons pack up on Saturday.)

Jon, Ruth and Kate leave for Colorado then. Kate will meet two realtors out there and see some houses in situ. I’ll be packing books while they’re gone, maybe cleaning out some files, too.

Old computers, keyboards, mice and one printer will also head off to new places. Computer breaking yards are not as glamorous as the ship breakers of Bangladesh (which are pretty grungy really), but they’re vital. In fact, in the near future they may become as important as the mines from which their rare metals came in the first place.

We’ll have at least one more round of furniture (some desks, file cabinets, maybe more bookshelves) and many more books. Probably more this and that, too, all headed to the consignment store. Kitchen items, surplus garden tools.

After the realtor and Kate’s visit to Colorado, we’ll have much more reliable numbers on which to base our house hunting and the overall cost of the move. (not cheap) Then, we’ll go back to puttering the move. Getting stuff done in relaxed, but regular way. March will come in its own time. So will the moving van.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld

Second Decade of the Third Millennium Television

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Summer                                                                     Most Heat Moon

Kate and I finished the final three episodes of 2014’s run of “Orange is the New Black.” We’ve been saving the last several episodes of “House of Cards” like hoarding candy against a day we can’t make it to the store. We did that by finishing up “New Tricks” and “Single-Handed.”

Now for those of you who still watch TV with the cable tuner and channels into the 400’s this may not be familiar ground for you. “Orange is the New Black” is, like “House of Cards”, a made for Netflix tv series. Both are really more like a novel with 13 chapters available all at once, and right now anyway, once a year. When ready, Netflix puts up all 13 episodes at once, available for streaming. If you wanted, and I imagine some do, you can watch all of them in one session.

Kate and I tend to do it a couple of episodes or one episode at a time. The second decade of the third millennium experience, watching video shows with no advertisements, feels like a luxury, like we’re getting away with something. Yet, I imagine there is a whole audience of kids for whom advertisements would be the odd experience, not their absence.

“New Tricks” and “Single-Handed”, on the other hand, we watch on Huluplus. It collects current tv shows (and all the episodes of older ones) and streams them, albeit with brief advertising, more like the old broadcast experience. There are though the important exceptions of being able to choose when and what to watch and to stop/pause it whenever desired. Huluplus also has movies, including 800 movies from the wonderful Criterion Collection.

We also watch certain other programs on Amazon Prime. Having a Prime membership in Amazon comes not only with “free” two-day shipping, but over a million downloadable songs and many movies and tv series available for “free.” Free in this case means no additional charge.

So that’s our new millennium television experience. No Comcast. No Timeswarner. Only our Roku box and three subscription services whose net cost is $30 a month. It may sound like we watch a lot of TV, but we only watch when we want, what we want. It is, as always, an excellent way to decelerate the mind in the evening.

And best of all, we’re shelling out much less to Comcast. All of this comes in over our broadband link for which, unfortunately, we still have only one choice. Comcast.

Friends, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

Charge It

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Beltane                                                           Emergence Moon

This post is for friend Tom Crane who bought a Chevy Volt a couple of years ago and, in engineer fashion, has been keeping data about it ever since. Here’s a link to an NYT article today: Owners Who Are Happy When the Engine Doesn’t Start. This article itself references three blogs:  Volt Stats, Volt Fan Site, and CarKnow.  This last one is for those who want to hack their rides.

The era of the all-electric car is not yet upon us, but the consumer fleet will move that way as responses to climate change push us further into electricity as the dominant energy source for more and more things.

Kudos to all of those who are willing to pioneer these changes. May they breed others.

Friends, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

Leeks In The Ground, Fresh Oil in the Truck

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Beltane                                                              Emergence Moon

I planted leeks this morning and will plant the onions soon. The leeks went in with a IMAG0595sprinkling of Jubilate (microbial inoculant) and a drenching with transplant water, made from OND and water. OND is a fish emulsion.  After closing up the 8″ trenches, I put all the planting paraphernalia back in the honey house, then hopped in the Rav4.

Over to Carlson Toyota for its 35,000 mile oil change and service. While waiting, the Lenovo laptop connected with Perseus and I went over my Latin for Friday’s session with Greg. In the work for him we’re back when Jupiter told his azure brother, Neptune, to let loose the reins that hold back the rivers. Let them flood the earth. The waters cover the fields, the cattle, the human beings and their homes and temples.

On the way to Carlson I had a thought about mentors. I’ve often said that I’ve neglected mentors and have probably suffered because of it. It occurred to me that that’s not exactly true. I have a circle of mentors in the Woolly Mammoths.