Category Archives: GeekWorld

Cooking, GeekWorld

Two Racks

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Samhain                                                          Thanksgiving Moon

Today I needed to find a rack of lamb, something our local butcher at Festival Foods said she “…couldn’t get until the week before Christmas.”  After assuring me that neither her suppliers nor any local grocers stocked such an exotic piece of meat, she concluded with sorry I couldn’t help you.

Well.  I got on the web, went to the Byerly’s website, ordered a rack of lamb, 2 in fact, some italian sausage and a nice brie.  Then I noticed they would deliver.  I chose that option and will get those items plus a couple more delivered to our home on Saturday morning.  Food, delivered.  From a grocery store.  I knew it was happening, but I’d never tried it before.  We’ll see how it goes.

The whole process was over ten minutes after the Festival butcher said she couldn’t help. The problem for brick and mortar operations is their vulnerability to better service available with little or no friction on the part of the buyer.  Who knows, I may buy food more often this way.

A trip over to Byerly’s in Maple Grove would take an hour to an hour and a half plus.  This accomplishes the task with literally no travel on my part.  That’s a good deal and worth money, both in time and car cost.  Yes, there’s a delivery fee of $10, but that’s less than the trips cost to me.

Not sure I would ever want to buy groceries entirely on line, but I might.  I’ve just never done it until now.  Maybe it makes the most sense.   The cyber links we have at our fingertips are changing the most mundane tasks in ways we couldn’t have predicted.  Some good, some bad.

By that I mean some that make things work better for us, others make things work worse for us.  The latter group includes, at a minimum, the invasive intelligence gathering carried out by not only the NSA but by corporate interests of all sorts, not just google.

 

GeekWorld, Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Still Plugging Along

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Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

Working through the revisions in Missing, having fun, surprising myself.  About a third of the way into the manuscript, though the later chapters have more work than what I’ve done so far.  Ways of knitting themes and character development with the narrative come more easily at this stage.

Got a new piece of software today, Dramatica Pro.  I’m hoping it will help me deepen my work while making it more exciting.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  It’s supposed to take a long time to learn.

Five more verses of Ovid.  These verses had a textual problem that had me digging around in the Oxford Classical Text’s version.  It’s supposed to be the best manuscript available now.  The Metamorphoses presents certain problems since it’s oldest manuscript dates from the 9th century, seven to eight hundred years after it was written.  The Aeneid, for example, has some fourth century manuscripts, still within the time of the Roman Empire.

And finished up the next to last poet of ModPo. I’ll finish tomorrow and start on my assessments on Friday.  Yeah.

Cooking, Garden, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths

Friends

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Lughnasa                                                                  Harvest Moon

Woolly meeting tonight.  Kate baked a ground cherry pie and a raspberry pie.  Big hits.  “All hail, Kate!”  There was applause near the end for the desert.  Yin served her wonderful variations on Chinese originals, tonight a noodle and pork and vegetable dish.

Scott introduced the topic of the Singularity and we talked about technology and change for the rest of the evening.  Mark Odegard brought up a good point about advances in technology contributing to a digital divide with digital haves and digital have nots.  This divide will tend to reinforce class and racial divisions.  He said this in reaction to me saying I wasn’t particularly worried about the Singularity.  His point was that the rapid advances in technology can and will have unintended social consequences.  He’s right.

In this argument I find myself on the conservative side, that is, I believe there are so many fundamental activities that make us human from painting to poetry, music to novels, athletics and theatre.  They are not reducible to code nor products artificial intelligence can reasonably be expected to create. There are also the incredible complexities of life itself, human relationships, the intricate interlocking webs of ecology systems that will always, I believe, outstrip any technological advance.

And I love technology, gadgets, the new.  Just don’t see them hanging out with me at a Woolly meeting as full participants.  Ever.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, World History

Is It the End, My Friend?

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Lughnasa                                                                         Harvest Moon

The singularity is near.  Can we prevent the takeover of the machines?  Will technology devour us, turning the master-slave relationship upside down in Nietzschean irony?  Life with intelligent machines has become a reality already.  Are we too late, doomed to follow our lemming-like path of one more gadget to disaster?

Doubt it.  First.  Depictions of the apocalypse have been failing since the notion first muscled its way onto the human imaginal stage.  We’re very good at predicting the end and equally talented at forgetting that it never happened.  In the Hebrew scriptures there was only one way to tell a good prophesy from a bad one.  Did it foretell events?  If so, good prophecy.  If not, bad prophecy.  And prophecies of  the end time have, so far at least, been wanting.  As proof, I offer the fact that I’m writing about
them.

Second.  Events do not occur in a vacuum.  That is, even if a singularity event or its near cousin came to pass, it would have been preceded by other advances outside of its ambit and the fact of its occurrence itself would shift matters in ways unpredictable.  These interacting variables would almost certainly create a less dire circumstance than techno-gloomy gusses anticipate.

Third. Remember Malthus?  He had a simple idea about food production and the carrying capacity of the earth.  He bet we would return to subsistence level agriculture once the population outstripped the food supply.  Hasn’t happened.  Why?  Agriculture advances, logistical advances, economic advances.  Simple ideas tend to leave out the complicated world in which we actually live.

Finally, will the end come?  Yep.  It will.  There are astrophysical forces at play in the solar system that will finish off life on earth and after that earth itself will be absorbed as our chief ally, Sol, expands into a red giant.  Will humanity have figured out how to live among the stars by then?  My guess?  Yes.

My sense is that we muddle along more often than anything else.  And the singularity will be a curiosity of our era.  Remember 2012?

GeekWorld

Lonely Coax Cable

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Lughnasa                                                                   Honey Moon

As I installed the CD changer and cleaned up the clutter of wires, I removed all the wires no longer needed.  To my surprise among them was the coaxial cable linking our television to Comcast.  Not necessary.  We now get all of our television content from DVD, Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Video.

Until I set all those extra wires aside, I’d forgotten that the coax no longer hooked up to anything TV related.  It looks lonely now.  I might have to bring it a computer.  Oh, wait.  Wi-fi.  Don’t need it for that either.  Still need the one downstairs with the modem and the router though.

GeekWorld

An Electric Surprise

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Lughnasa                                                        Honey Moon

Kate’s at a sewing circle all day today so I decided to surprise her and hook up the 300 CD player we filled up a while back.  While doing that, I eliminated all the old cords and connectors, tied like ones together with colored plastic-wire ties and dusted the whole area. It all works.  This is the kind of household maintenance I know how to do. (not that it’s hard.)

 

GeekWorld

Darwin

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Lughnasa                                                                  Honey Moon

Darwin has a clear, strong voice in On the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man.  After reading three chapters of his work, I came away with my jaws far apart in amazement at this guy’s mind.  He looks at things to which we all have access, but he sees them.  In this quote he does fall prey to a bias of his British Imperial time, but the point is brilliant:  “He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation.” (Chapter xxi, p.1, Descent of Man)

(Punch, 1882)

Also, I loved this from a couple of pages further along:  “I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.”

(Editorial Cartoon, 1871)

When on the voyage around South America, I read some of Darwin’s journal entries from the voyage of the Beagle.  The more I learn about him the more he seems to belong to the category of inexplicable genius, a quantum step forward in human understanding: Newton, Einstein, Aristotle, Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, the early Vedic thinkers, those sorts of folks.

Bees, GeekWorld, Health, Writing

Various

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Lughnasa                                                                    Honey Moon

Got my second pneuma-vax since I got one before age 65.  That was fun.

Loki’s Children has begun to occupy front space in my mind, turning to it in the morning now when I’m at my best.  Work in the garden early, while it’s still moderately cool, then inside for the a.m.

After Missing has gone through its final paces with beta readers and Robert Kleim, I’ll begin seeking agents.  In fact I plan to develop a list this week, so I’ll be ready when a final draft is.

Two things to do this week in addition to others:  1.  Make candles.  2. Finally install our CD changer that we filled up a couple of months ago.

GeekWorld

The Age of MOOCS

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Lughnasa                                                                Honey Moon

The age of MOOCS.  A fine age for folks like me for whom learning has become a lifelong habit.  I finished my New History for a New China a couple of weeks ago and am about half way through Modern/Post-Modern.  Later in September I’ll pick up Online Gaming and Literature and Modern Poetry.

Each class I’ve taken so far puts another foundational element under certain current projects.  The Greek Mythology class and the Online Gaming classes support the Tailte Trilogy.  The Modern/Post-Modern strengthens the bones of Reimagining Faith.  New History fits my ongoing interest in China both ancient and modern.  Modern Poetry, well, that’s just for fun, but I do write poetry so it will help there and with my work on the Metamorphoses.