Category Archives: GeekWorld

GeekWorld, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Moving Day

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Winter                                                              Cold Moon

A lot of time today going back over translation of Jason and Medea, trying to fix broken phrases, suss out mysteries hidden behind Ovid’s syntax and word choices.  I’m beginning to get a taste now of what the task of translation entails.  I’ve spent three years now levering myself up over the transom; I’m in the room; but, I can’t sit down to work yet.  Too much still to know.  But, I can see myself working in that room in the foreseeable future.

(The Ancient Roman Temple of Bacchus, commissioned by Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius and designed by an unknown architect c. 150 AD)

At the same time I had set today as moving day for all internet related tasks, all tasks requiring good security, all task but writing, really, and even there, the blog moved over to this new(ish) computer.  I’ve had this one for six months or so, but the work required to transfer all those functions over here is, at least for my tech level, significant.

Anyhow, I’ve got most of it done now, all the necessary stuff and I’m writing this entry on the new machine.  In the way of computers this work (the writing) is much the same.  It’s the guts that differ.  A terabyte of storage.  8 gigs of ram.  A bigger screen.  A fresh hard-disk and room to swap another one in when I need it.

[YOUR ALUMINUM FUTURE]

I now have a land of forgotten computers, brave electronic servants whose capacity got left behind by changing times.  This computer, though, I think will last a while.  The PC is fast becoming a less and less expensive door-stop though I still prefer them to laptops.  That’s  in part because I work at home; but it’s also because I love the ergonomic keyboard and  greater capacity for less bucks.

I did encounter one head scratcher in the transfers I did today.  I moved 25 gigs of images onto this machine.  I had them organized in folders.  Folders I understood.  For some reason, undoubtedly a reason of my own making, each image got its own folder on this new machine, meaning I have to sort through and reorganize literally thousands of images.

It’s not all bad. I’ve wanted to cull and reorganize my images for awhile, but I hadn’t decided on now.

Meanwhile Kate’s come down with a cold.  I convinced her to go to bed and try rest and fluids.  These are not necessarily obvious moves to the physicians among us.

GeekWorld

Gettin’ Things Done

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Winter                                                                                 Cold Moon

I’ve discovered a neat tool that has helped me get stuff done.  Well, three of them.  In particular.

The first one is the Weekly Planner.  I guess it’s based on Stephen Covey’s work, though I haven’t read the Seven Habits.  What it does is very simple.  It gives you a column for creating color coded roles in your life.  Mine are:  Self, Husband, Father, Grandfather, Family Guy (Siblings and Cousins), Scholar, Writer, Art Historian/Critic, Blogger, Gardener/Beekeeper/Woodsman, IT Guy and the role name I’m least happy with:  Pagan Thinker.  Just not sure about that one.

Next it asks you what is the most important thing you can do this week in that role.  There is a one-week calendar next to the list of roles and you slide the goal over to the day and it goes with the color of the role attached.  Then, you click on it when you’re done.

Here’s why it’s helped me.  It makes me consider, at the beginning of a week, what are the important matters I need to be sure to work on.  I don’t clutter this calendar up with other matters unless I have an appointment or time with a friend.  Then, I enter them here only to ensure I leave enough time for what’s really important.

It’s simple and effective.  If you’re into this kind of thing, I imagine you’ll find it useful.

The second tool is Evernote.  Again, a simple idea, but so useful.  Weekly Planner is free at the level I’m using it which is fine for me. It’s free, too. Evernote I pay $100 a year to use at an advanced level.  Why?  Because it’s the equivalent of a filing cabinet for the web.  See an article that would help writing my Tailte novels?  Click on the Evernote icon and it asks where to save it.  Press save article or page or url and it puts the article under Tailte Mythos.  Researching a trip or already made reservations online?  They go under travel.  You can create any number of notebooks, headed however you want.  Tres useful.

The third is Instapaper.  If you’re like me, you go through the web, see an article and think, gee, I’d like to read that but not right now.  It may not be something you want to save.  I click on the read later icon installed on my bookmarks bars and the article is stored in my account.  Which is free, by the way.  Then, when I have time, I click on my account, go to stored articles or webpages, read them, and often delete them.

Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Great Work

There’s No Reason to Worry, Dave

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Winter                                                                     Cold Moon

Here’s an analysis in the January issue of Wired that caught my attention.  I don’t doubt that the numbers they use are right, though I haven’t confirmed them.

“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields… Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.”  Wired January 2013

The argument here defines technological triumphalism, not only does technology solve all our ills, it always will.  And so it was good.

However.  Let’s go backwards to the time period before the industrial revolution when most folks still lived on farms.  I’m no romantic about subsistence agriculture having owned a farm, The (not so) Peaceable Kingdom, and engaged in intensive permaculture horticulture here at home.  It’s hard work and a bad year can literally kill you.

(Davos, World Economic Forum, A_Lunch_at_the_Belvedere)

Even so.  There’s a price to pay for salvation by the machine.  Think of it, machines take humans off the land and put them in service of making more and smarter machines.  That’s the essential argument this whole article makes.  Yes, it relieved the awful strains of serfdom, tenant farming, subsistence on increasingly smaller plots as inheritance ate up legacy lands.  But.  It created the hells of the looms, the coal age, the coal mine.  Child labor.  A cash economy where no cash spells doom faster even than failed crops.

Then there’s that relationship to the land.  We’ve removed so many people from the land, distanced them further and further to the sources of their own foods and we’ve done it via industrial processes now ruining those sources, those faraway yesterday sources.  That we cannot live without.

Technology has triumphed.  Along with its handmaiden, capitalism.  Neither of them care that they eat not their young, but yours.  Each of them assume an instrumentalist view of natural resources and human labor, seeing them both as infinite and replaceable when in fact they are neither.

I’m no luddite.  I love my computer and I look forward to a robot that can take over weeding our garden.  It’s that price.  Who tallies up the human and ecological cost of this capitalist, techno future?  Who thinks about how to reduce and when possible eliminate it?

Not the authors of articles for technology’s cheer leaders.

GeekWorld, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

a failure to communicate

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Winter                                                                     Moon of the Winter Solstice

How’s this for irony?  My Latin tutor, Greg, and I conduct our sessions on the phone.  Have done for three years now.  Yesterday I had read out a line from the Loeb translation of a sentence we were having trouble with and I waited.  Nothing.  That had happened before so I hung up and called him again.  His phone picked up.  I spoke.  Nothing.

Well, then, he called me on my cell phone.  The landline works better for an hour or so of tutoring, so we usually use it.  I answered.  I spoke.  Nothing.  We traded attempts back and forth until Greg sent me an e-mail.  Was my phone on mute?  No, I e-mailed him back.  Weird.

We continued for a while, then we decided to scrap the session and move into January.  He e-mailed me later and said that both his and Ana’s phone had had the same problem.  AT&T.

Anyhow this tickled my funny bone.  Trying to learn how to communicate with a long dead poet in his own language, two of us, speaking  a common language, couldn’t communicate because the technology prevented it.  When we switched to e-mail, on which we could communicate, we could not use it for continuing our communication focused on Ovid.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Humanities, Myth and Story, US History

It’s Science’s Fault

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Fall                                                                                     Fallowturn Moon

 

Here’s a “timeless principle” I found on Rep. Aikin’s website today:

Timeless Principles

George Washington

News image“I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see a policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery.” (letter to Lawrence Lewis, August 4, 1797) — George Washington was the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States of America

I get the how.   But still I wonder about the anti-science perspective that gains traction in an age of vaccines, space flight, electric cars and digital communications.  After shock and awe, I wonder about the why of it.

Not how.  I know how:  1. Minds foreclosed by religious dogma, which BTW is different from theology which can admit searching and questioning.  Dogma are matters of certainty necessary to faith in a particular religious community. 2.  Minds wedded to an ideology that functions like a dogma.  Doctrinaire Marxists, objectivists and libertarians are examples here.

I’ve been thinking about the anti-science movement since the Sierra Club legislative awards ceremony on Tuesday.  You need go no further unfortunately than the House of Representative’s Committee on Science, Space and Technology to find it alive and voting.    NASA, the Department of Energy, EPA, ATSDR, NSF, FAA, NOAA, National Institute of Standards and Technology, FEMA, the U.S. Fire Administration, and United States Geological Survey all fall within the partial or total overview of this committee.

Our lady parts ambassador Todd Aikin sits on that committee. (see an example of his website below)  Also on the committee from a Georgia university town and a medical doctor: ATHENS, Ga. (AP) — Georgia Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell” meant to convince people that they do not need a savior.

An entry on the California Aggie blog adds this:  “Sitting with Akin on the affectionately-dubbed “Anti-Science Committee” is Paul Broun, (see above) a creationist who believes the Earth is 9,000 years old, Mo Brooks and Jim Sensenbrenner, both global-warming deniers, and Ralph Hall, who blocked a bill to fund science research by essentially forcing the opposing candidates to vote in favor of pornography.”

This last gem of a politician is, wait for it, the chair of the committee.  Chew on that one for awhile.

Continue reading It’s Science’s Fault →

Family, GeekWorld

Video Phone Calls

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Fall                                                                 Harvest Moon

I’m a geek of sorts.  I love computers, have owned many and, in fact, plan to buy another one soon.  Technological triumphalism, however, like most ecstatic extensions of an idea falls flat with me.  Technology will not solve our energy problem, at least not without substantial non-technological work such as conservation policies and actions, political barriers to fossil fuel use.  Technology does not make us smarter.  It gives us information quicker so that our intellectual reach expands but we still use our old mental processes.

With that caveat let me say that technology is truly wonderful.  I just spent half an hour with Mark and Mary again, connecting Minnesota, Saudia Arabia and Singapore with not only voice, but video.  It was a chance to catch up on each other’s lives, to take the pulse of each other with visual feedback as well as verbal.  This astonishes me.

 

GeekWorld

Show Me

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Lugnasa                                              Hiroshima Moon

Woollies met for our first Monday restaurant meal at an Indian restaurant near Wayzata.  So-so food, but great conversation.

The prime topic of the night was an epistemological one.  Mark said he reserved judgement on the facticity of  the Curiosity project.  More than once he said he wanted to check other sources, see if they agreed.  This comes in part from a deep disillusionment with the government during the Vietnam war as well as an incident involving his father. (Which I didn’t hear. It was noisy.)  It also comes, I suspect, from his creative personality which prizes openness, non-foreclosure.  It comes, too, from a knowledge of the world of science gained while creating exhibits for the Minnesota Science Museum.

At any rate Tom, Bill and I had no question about the Curiosity landing, at least not as to its occurrence.  We went back and forth for a hour or so over what constitutes evidence, the possible reasons for deception, the notion that some biases can be inherent to the observer (sexism, mechanistic as opposed to vitalistic understandings–well, we didn’t really discuss this, but we could’ve, if I’d thought about it then, accepting rather than skeptical bents).

It is not my usual experience to find someone being more skeptical than I am and I had to consider my own gullibility factor.  It may be that I’m too quick to accept the work of physicists, astronomers, NASA engineers but I see no reason to believe that right now.  I proposed a continuum of science from the realm of physics, astronomy, chemistry–the hard sciences, with a mid-point perhaps being biology and extending on to experimental psychology and economics, for example.  I have less skepticism about the hard sciences and the work in them than I do about the biological sciences and I’m definitely show me when it comes to the softer end of this continuum.

This was an intense, even impassioned, but calm and deliberate conversation.  The kind I hope I can have more and more despite my tendency to jump in with both feet.

Thanks, guys.

GeekWorld

Wow

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Lugnasa                                                            Hiroshima Moon

These are the first images taken by NASA’s rover Curiosity after landing in Gale Crater on Mars, shot with the rover’s Hazcam cameras. The image on the left shows one of the rover’s wheels. When it first showed up on the screen in JPL’s mission control, someone could be heard shouting “It’s the wheel, it’s the wheel!” The image on the right shows rocks, dust, and the rover’s shadow on the surface of Mars.

Shortly after these images were sent to Earth, the rover’s signal was blocked by Gale Crater’s central peak, known as Mt. Sharp. We’ll bring you more images from Curiosity as they become available.

Images: JPL/NASA

GeekWorld

Curious? Watch (Correction on Landing Date–August 6th, not the 5th)

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Lugnasa                                                         Hiroshima Moon

Watch this one-ton lab-on-wheels land on Mars.

Watch Curiosity’s Landing!

Aug 5, 2012     10:31 p.m.   Pacific
Aug 6, 2012     1:31 a.m.   Eastern
Aug 6, 2012     5:31 a.m.   Universal

Countdown to landing:

  1
days		 :  12
hrs		 :  29
mins		 :  6
secs


Watch NASA TV Show Online
Begins Aug 5: 2012
8:30 p.m. Pacific
11:30 p.m. Eastern

Find Live Events in Your Town
Event Map
Mission Briefing Schedule

Where?  See the following from Wired.com:

The first place to check out will be here, at Wired Science, where we will be providing two live feeds from JPL, the rover’s headquarters, via NASA TV. The first feed will feature commentary from scientists and engineers who work on Curiosity and will play Aug. 5 from 8:30 to 11 p.m. Pacific (11:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Eastern) and then again from 12:30 to 1:30 a.m. Pacific (3:30 to 4:30 Eastern) on Aug. 6. For those looking for to get the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes details, the second feed will carry only audio from mission controllers regarding Curiosity’s progress and will begin on Aug. 5 at 8:30 p.m. Pacific (11:30 Eastern). If all goes well, NASA has stated that they might be able to share the first image from the ground during these feeds, likely a shot of the rover’s wheel indicating that everything’s in working order.

 

We will also host another great feed created by Universe Today, the SETI Institute, and CosmoQuest. On their Google+ page, the team will have commentary by astronomers Pamela Gay and Phil Plait and feature live coverage from JPL and the Planetary Society’s PlanetFest with reporters Scott Lewis and Amy Shira Teitel. Those interested can find more information and sign up to “attend” the Hangout on Air. The show will begin at 8 p.m. Pacific (11 p.m. Eastern) and go four hours, covering the entire landing sequence and aftermath.

One more feed will be from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. This webcast will start at 10:15 p.m. Pacific (1:15 a.m. Eastern) on Aug. 5, just when the rover is expected to be touching its wheels down on Mars. The museum’s staff and visiting scientists will be on hand to talk all about the exciting mission and provide updates as they come in.