U.S. Elections 2024: A Political Post
Since early voting has started, it's time for this.
Please don't vote for a party that is actively trying to reduce--in a democracy--the ability of people to vote. Not all voters, mind you, just the groups who are likely to vote against them.
Reducing the number of ballot boxes and polling places in "liberal" areas. Onerous identification systems in the clear absence of even minimal voter fraud. Fantastical fraud claims to justify these actions, even when there is zero evidence to support them.
Call it what you want. Authoritarianism, fascism, the name doesn't really matter. It's the opposite of democracy.
Anyone who runs as a representative of that party is unworthy of your support.
Friday Links!
Well, that was a week. Here are some links for your Friday reading pleasure.
Expectations and a Sad Anniversary
Gloria's accident was three years ago today.
The first anniversary hit me like a sledgehammer. It was very, very bad.
Last year, I expected it to be just as bad, but it wasn't. That made me think it would get a little easier each year. A linear process.
It's not.
It was harder this year than last, probably due to my expectations.
I hope that some year it will be just another day, and I'll be able to reminisce about Gloria without it being the first thing that comes to mind.
Deceived
Sadly, the piriformis improvement was fool's good.
It was significantly better for about a week, then I woke up one morning and it was back to ground zero. The frustrating part of this is I can't figure out the pattern. Activity/stretching/sitting should add up to some kind of pattern of better/worse, but it's nothing I can discern.
Plus, piriformis syndrome is apparently so particularized that a million different things have helped a million different people. Stretches, strengthening, rest, massage, voodoo. It all works for somebody.
Now I'm stretching a bit less, trying to alternate workout activities that involve repetitive motion, and researching voodoo as quickly as possible.
A Story
I couldn't take about this when it happened, for obvious reasons. I think enough time (eight years) has passed now, though.
When we were in Austin, there was a boy playing hockey who was a year older than Eli. A great kid, genuinely. Excellent hockey player, straight 'A' student, and very congenial and polite.
His parents were, too. They were both first-generation immigrants, both professionals. Always upbeat and ready with a smile. Whenever I saw one of them (practice times often overlapped), I'd stop and chat. I always left feeling glad I'd stopped.
One afternoon, I received a call from the person in the hockey program who had basically adopted Eli (he's been adopted many times). She's one of the best people I ever met, and she's Canadian (bonus). She said something bad had happened and that I needed to check the local news.
I did. There was a story about a shooting in a suburb of Austin involving a husband and a wife.
It was the boy's parents.
The story said the wife had been shot and the husband had turned the gun on himself. What the story didn't say is that the great kid, the congenial and polite kid, had been home at the time, along with two siblings. When he heard the first shot, he ran to the bedroom and pounded on the door, trying to stop whatever was happening.
Then there was a second shot.
I felt numb. There was nothing in me that knew how to respond.
The great kid was just finishing junior high or starting high school, if I remember correctly, and now he was both an orphan and had two siblings younger than him to look out for. It would be a crushing, impossible load for anyone.
He hung on, for a while. Then he quit playing hockey, which was a second family. Stopped going to school. Started getting into trouble. He must have thought nothing mattered, and who could blame him?
It was the kind of story that doesn't even have a suitable word attached to it, because 'tragedy' is so inadequate.
I thought about him yesterday, for reasons unknown, and I decided to try and find him online. I expected not to find him, or to find only sadness, but I wanted to find out.
I stumbled onto his Instagram.
A picture of him with a long-time girlfriend. Pictures of him playing hockey. Skateboarding. Looking comfortable in his own skin.
Somehow, he made it through to the other side. I don't know many who would.
I don't know if I've ever felt so much respect and happiness for another human being in my entire life.
Assorted Stuff
First, Halloween is out of control:
This pains me, because I love Halloween. What's next? Low-earth orbit satellites?
This was a pair of jeans I saw while we were in Detroit:
Those are cats by the way. I texted the picture to C with the message I found my holiday gift.
She declined.
A Legionary's Life
The new system is installed, more or less.
Installing Windows is easy. Setting up all your peripherals and adding a second drive and downloading the programs you need takes quite a bit longer. In the end, though, it's very stable and relatively quiet (though I'm going to change out a few fans for Noctua's).
The system is a Microcenter pre-build, as I've mentioned before, and it's a quality build. I'm very impressed. The CPU is a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. All the other hardware is in the upper section of mid-tier, but after having the same system for the last ten years, it all feels like a Ferrari.
So, of course, I'm fascinated with what is basically a text game.
It's called A Legionary's Life, and you play as a common Roman soldier at the bottom of the food chain, just trying to survive. No magicians or dragons or any fantasy elements. Plus, you'll die. Quite a lot, really. When you do, you get a small starting boost to your next character.
The historical research seems solid, and the writing reflects it. It's oddly mesmerizing, just scraping along. I highly recommend it, and it's only $3.99 as part of the latest Steam sale.
Friday Links!
Leading off this week, and it's HUGE, Geoff Engelstein's new game is in collaboration with--Kurt Vonnegut! And there's a profile in the New York Times about it. What a great story.
Kurt Vonnegut the Board Game Designer.
DQ Film Advisor and Nicest Guy in the World Ben Ormand sent me this link, and it's a stunning use of AI generated video. Plenty of editing, I'm sure, but still incredible: Harry Potter reimagined as a redneck using AI.
From Meg McReynolds, and it's Fat Bear Week, people! Weigh-in With Fat Bears at Katmai National Park for Fat Bear Week.
From Wally, and I had no idea this phrase was trademarked: US Court States Marvel And DC Have Lost Their Super Hero Trademark. Generally excellent recommendations: Science-Fiction Books Scientific American’s Staff Love. Idiot alert: Crime 81-year-old man sentenced to prison for cloning giant "Montana Mountain King" sheep for captive trophy hunting.
From C. Lee, and it's an incredibly low fine: Samsung Fined After Exposing Manufacturing Workers to Radiation. This is riveting: ‘Even the breeze was hot’: how incarcerated people survive extreme heat in prison. This is promising: Kyoto team finds way to detect early pancreatic cancer with AI. Watch out! Walmart customers scammed via fake shopping lists, threatened with arrest. 1984, here we come: Ford wants to eavesdrop on passenger conversations to help target ads. This is alarming: Bird flu is spreading rapidly in California; infected herds double over weekend. Related: Can our stockpiles of Tamiflu protect against a bird flu pandemic? This is incredibly clever: Hacker plants false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity. It's genuinely incredible how much power LLMs use: OpenAI asked US to approve energy-guzzling 5GW data centers, report says. This is a fascinating trend: High-end cameras make epic comeback despite smartphone ubiquity. It took long enough: A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last. Apparently these grow in Michigan, too? Foraging for America’s Forgotten Fruit. The Wikipedia entry for the previous link: Asimina triloba (the American paw paw).
Old
I took a walk today and missed the turn-off for the path by the river, so I decided to go through a field to reach the path.
I reached a wall ((at ground level for me). I looked over and there was quite a drop to the river trail. All right, no big deal.
I scrunched around so I could hold onto the top of the wall with my arms, then hung down as far as I could before I let go. I think the total drop after that was about 3.5 feet. Again, not a big deal.
The problem, though, is that the last time I did this (and it wasn't a big deal) was probably 30 years ago, if not 40. I landed and it felt like I dropped from a 12-story building.
Plus, my body forgot how to land. Your body forgets how to do all kinds of things, but your mind remembers the outcome as being good, so you trick yourself into trying things you shouldn't just because you could do them before (long ago).
I jammed up my toe, but otherwise I'm fine. It's just annoying how one-dimensional my fitness is, even though I'm in good shape.
Detroit!
This is what happens when you show up for your Global Entry interview on time--but a day early. The Homeland Security person sees you drove 2.5 hours and fits you in 30 minutes later. Unbelievable kindness (and I have a Global Entry number now).
I went with C because she's terrific company and it enabled us to split the driving (5 1/2+ hours in total).
After my total embarrassment, we went downtown to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). It's a fantastic museum, one of the highest-rated in the country, and we found a Native American exhibition that was remarkable in every way.
When you go to the DIA, though, you go see the Diego Rivera murals: Detroit Industry Murals, Detroit Institute of Arts. Wikipedia: Detroit Industry Mural.
There are 27 separate panels, but here are photos of the two largest. They're overwhelming, both in their scope and how the natural light coming in from the ceiling strikes them.
This time, though, I noticed one panel in particular, a very small one:
Enhance:
If you click on that to see it at full size and resolution, it's shocking how different it is from the other panels. C said it wouldn't be out of place as an illustration in The Man You Trust, and I agree with her.
Detroit
We just got back after a long day in Detroit, but I'll have pictures to share tomorrow of the DIA (Detroit Institute of Arts).
Plus, after ten years, I got a new computer! I'll tell you about that as well.
The Art of Interviewing
I talked to Eli 23.1 today and he told me what he's learned about interviewing.
He mentioned two things in particular as greatly improving the quality of the interview. First, meeting the person you're interviewing before you interview them and spending some time getting to know them in general. Ideally, this is an entirely separate event from the interview itself, often at a separate location from the planned interview site.
Second, he's started hand-writing thank you notes for the people he interviews. High-quality paper, carefully written, and placed in a suitable envelope. People are genuinely appreciative of the effort and will often offer additional disclosures or a further willingness to cooperate.
He was hoping to have one in-depth interview before he left Colombia. It's looking like he'll leave with six. All between one and two hours long.
Friday Links!
From John D., and it's a terrific headline: Why an Alaska island is using peanut butter and black lights to find a rat that might not exist.
From Wally, and it's a meandering rumination on LOTR and pipes: Today is Hobbit Day!—Tolkien & Peterson. It wouldn't hurt to have this happen much more often: Comedian John Mulaney brutally roasts SF techies at Dreamforce. This is solid advice: Playtesting Card Games.
From C. Lee, and this is brutal: Some baby boomers are burning through their retirement savings to pay for cancer treatments. Then they have to go back to work. A serious problem: The music industry's latest problem: Archive hard drives from the 90s are failing. A bizarre story: Poisoned trees gave a wealthy couple in Maine a killer ocean view. Residents wonder, at what cost? Completely off the deep end: A day in Elon Musk’s mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis. This is terrifying (and like the last link, billionaires are a policy mistake): Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison. Flailing: Exclusive: How Intel lost the Sony PlayStation business. An excellent read: Cheap money and bad bets: How the games industry turned pandemic success into disaster. Fascinating research: For aging Japan, a troubling link between heat and dementia. These are beautiful: Dedicated artists are keeping Japan’s ancient craft of temari alive.
From Ken P., and it's for you coffee fiends: How pour-over coffee got good. An idiot's disaster: Uwe Boll's $2.5 million Postal movie crowdfunder is a trainwreck, forced to abort after raising $850 and the game's devs say they 'have no f***** idea' who the people behind it are. This seems quite unnecessary: Bluetooth 6.0 adds centimeter-level accuracy for device tracking — upgraded version also improves device pairing. Bizarre: 'What a sad existence': The first cheaters in Deadlock have been spotted, giving players some pretty bad flashbacks to TF2 and CS. Nothing is private anymore: Mystery database containing sensitive info on 762,000 car-owners discovered by researchers. A nice payday: Man wins $1.6 million for 'hidden' invention from the 1980s. Not the brightest: Ford Truck 30,000 Pounds Over Weight Limit Smashes Through Historic Bridge. Ugh: How $20 and a lapsed domain allowed security pros to undermine internet integrity.
The Introvert
To be fair, I've felt like this many times (if you can't see it, click to enlarge).
