We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
While out on an anchorage Sunday we were awakened by thunder and hailstones + heavy rain on the roof around 11:30 pm. It was pitch black outside and we realized with the lightning flashes that the other three boats in the anchorage had fled to some safe port. Oh, and it had been such a mild sea breeze that we had left all of the hatches and eisenglass windows open.
It was a dramatic hour or so on the water for us.
We have some serious boaters who read us. For them, stormy nighttime navigation is probably easy. I have been a day-boater, salt water, most of my life (sail and power), but I am not used to this sort of overnight thing away from port. We have to up our game but I guess that midlife requires new things. Decay, or grow.
Another problem I have with overnight boating is that I like to get to the gym early. It straightens out my brain and body. On a boat, at 5 AM, there is no escape and nothing to do but sit or eat, neither of which I like to do very much.
"There are times when sailing feels like Murphy's Law in action. Because if anything can go wrong, it will. And, most likely, it will happen at night."
Scott Adams speaks and writes about talent stacks. He is addressing things that help with material success. Business success matters for sure whether the business is art and design, carpentry, real estate, electrical design, cooking, or options trading, and the more talent and/or skill the better.
I am good enough, but not the best, at my day job. I tend to be interested in general life competencies which have less relation to profitable pursuits.
Long-time readers know my list of life competencies. Nobody needs to excel at them, but the more of these you can sort-of handle, the richer life can be:
Friendships - most important of all
Swimming, snorkeling, and, best, diving
Doing some religion
Handling firearms
Handling horses
Fishing of any or all sorts
Sports - the more, the better
Physical training and weight training
Handiman skills - the more, the better
Gardening
Handling canoe, kayaks, sailboats, powerboats
Developing an art skill whether musical or other
Financial management - not rocket science. Just an estate guy and Vanguard funds.
Hiking, camping, basic climbing, and orienting abilities
Dog-handling and training
Natural history - knowing the trees, plants, bugs, birds, geography, geology, etc. makes being outdoors much more interesting
What's your favorite cold summer sandwich? (I say cold to eliminate things like burgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese, and meatball grinders.)
I'll include roll-ups as sandwiches, just to be kind to roll-up-eaters.
My go-to summer sandwich is a Turkey Club on white toast with extra mayo, and chips on the side. At this point in life, I'll take a "Junior Club," which is just one layer of the stuff.
As serious boaters, they know water vessels, but they volunteer their time for boat checks and boating skills. Even if you pass their checks, they have lots of useful info.
Doing some reading, and musing, on this 245th year of the greatness which is our fine nation. Right now, we live in a world where we're supposed to be humble, and there are factions which would prefer to not tout American Greatness. Still others believe our best years are behind us. My view is some of our best years are behind us, but our very best is still ahead, as long as we understand where we've come from, and the principles for which we stand.
I don't believe in being humble about our national identity. No other nation has done many of the things our nation has. Our Constitution was one of the very first, and certainly the first that enshrined individual rights as primary over the predations of a government. Our Constitution started a period of constitutional revolution which spread around most of the world at that time. And while our nations' flaws are evident, we are among the few nations which air our dirty laundry, not proudly, but to learn and improve. Other nations can point to civil or human rights failings we have now, or have had in the past, but none of them have a track record better than ours improving these rights.
I have had to re-learn much of what I once was comfortable with about boat-handling. Midlife crisis issues, I guess.
Gotta keep learning or re-learning skills, or decay. I am blessed with many interests and hobbies, but am at best mediocre with all of them. Due to time spent, I am at my best at my day job.
- This craft is a deep-V single diesel Downeast-style thing, Maine-style, lobster-boat-style. Heavy. Pretty, I feel. Designed to go from place to place regardless of weather and not a toy boat.
- It's all about "feel". Each boat has her own handling qualities. Like a horse, you have to know it, learn how she responds to things, make her an extension of your brain and body. Takes me many, many hours to do this without causing a problem. Maybe more hours than I have left. Mrs. BD: "Aw, you'll get used to it. It's just bigger." Good, bold life attitude on her part.
- Boats steer by the stern. Turning left makes the stern turns right to reorient the vessel. Duh. I knew that. It makes the stern turn into the damn dock.
- A rudder does not work in reverse. Duh. Well, you can steer in reverse with an outboard or sterndrive, but otherwise, not really. Easiest to handle is twin engines because you can steer with the engines alone. I don't have that so I have to learn like the guys with their lobster boats. We actually wanted a twin diesel but could not find one we liked from up north even down to Texas. Boats are in short supply right now.
- Docking and mooring in wind is as much of a bitch as it ever was. Can I back this boat into a slip? No way, even without wind. Well, probably could on a calm lake but not on real water.
- When over age 45, scrambling around a slippery bow deck feels (is) treacherous. Gotta hold on to something.
- Winds and currents can mess up your best intentions.
- Checklists. Gotta use them for everything. It's tough to remember everything, which is why pilots use them. Very easy to forget to check the oil in the generator.
- Put a little bleach in the water tank, and a little water-softener in the head to keep it sweet.
- Nighttime boating? I am so past that, and there are idiots out there. Could include me I guess.
- I do love the chug of a diesel engine. They just want to work hard at 3000 rpm. Work makes them happy.
- New GPS. I have little problem plotting a course on a chart. Not used to GPS plotting, but I will get it after a while. Anyway, 90% of the challenge of boat handling is at docks and in harbors and marinas.
- The basic knots? It you knew them once, they will come back. But they should be automatic. Clove hitch, bowline...Darn.
- Dockhands? God bless 'em. When they are around at the fuel dock.
I felt that the wonderful entymologist E.O. Wilson (the "Ant Man") got in over his head with scientism. Always liked him. I had a plastic ant farm as a kid and it was more interesting than an aquarium of bored little fish.
An edgy biography of Stephen Hawking has me reminiscing about science’s good old days. Or were they bad? I can’t decide. I’m talking about the 1990s, when scientific hubris ran rampant. As journalist Charles Seife recalls in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, Hawking and other physicists convinced us that they were on the verge of a “theory of everything” that would solve the riddle of existence. It would reveal why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is the way it is.
In this column, I’ll look at an equally ambitious and closely related claim, that science will absorb other ways of seeing the world, including the arts, humanities and religion. Nonscientific modes of knowledge won’t necessarily vanish, but they will become consistent with science, our supreme source of truth. The most eloquent advocate of this perspective is biologist Edward Wilson, one of our greatest scientist-writers.
In his 1998 bestseller Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson prophesies that science will soon yield such a compelling, complete theory of nature, including human nature, that “the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.” Wilson calls this unification of knowledge “consilience,” an old-fashioned term for coming together or converging. Consilience will resolve our age-old identity crisis, helping us understand once and for all “who we are and why we are here,” as Wilson puts it...
I know many who follow Maggie's may be unfamiliar, at best, or skeptical, at worst, of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency. But there is a lot of promise in the technology, and the tokens (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.) are modern versions of 'value transmission' which are not unlike money. They represent the value of the technology.
So, to understand why cryptocurrencies are important, it may help to understand the technology. Here is a brief video which explains the tech behind the currencies. Not all blockchains are the same, that's an important thing to remember. Improvements are made almost every day on all the different kinds of blockchains, and their uses. It's my personal opinion that the next 'big' one may be Cardano, as it has solved many issues behind the concept of 'smart contracts'.
For what it's worth, if you've heard of NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) and still aren't clear what they are, the best way to think of them is that an NFT is a representation of a contract of ownership for a product.
Let's say I take a digital photo and I create it as an NFT, and you purchase that NFT. This is like purchasing any other work of art, but instead of getting a certificate which says you own it, you get the NFT. If anyone uses a representation of that NFT, you receive a payment for it. In a way, NFTs are a means by which trademarks and copyrights may be enforced more effectively (there are still issues with this, but they are being overcome).
So while NFTs are not cryptocurrencies, they operate within the cryptocurrency 'system' because they utilize the blockchain (and many utilize cryptocurrencies as a means of payment). While a currency is fungible - that is, it can be exchanged or used for a variety of different things - many things of value are not fungible (or at least easily fungible). You can use a currency to buy a loaf of bread, or instead of bread you can use it for soup, or a pack of gum. It's fungible because it can be used to purchase any substitutable product or service. A work of art is non-fungible because, well, you're not paying for a cup of coffee with that Degas print you purchased.
Somebody asked me this weekend how many firearms I owned.
"Not sure," I said. "Never counted them." I guess I have too many. I am pretty sure that I have never shot anybody intentionally, but I did shoot a pal with birdshot one time accidentally. It happens in the woods. He was fine, and just glad I did not hit his dog.
Peterson lets a wise, seasoned Canadian journalist (Rex Murphy) tell his story. Gotta love the guy, along with his Scots/Irish (Newfie) style and rhythm.
You can see where Mao came from. His horrors were just historically normal. Of course, this is historical fiction but Frazer tried to make it realistic. Sir Harry, I feel, was the original James Bond.
From Amazon:
Lusting after a clergyman’s wife, smuggling opium to Hong Kong, coupling with an Amazonian woman river pirate, groveling before a ruthless warlord, and becoming the sexual plaything of the most beautiful and evil woman in the world, Sir Harry Flashman, the supreme antihero of the Victorian era, is ready to rise to the occasion to matter what depths of dishonor he must plumb. In this uninhibited and uproarious adventure, Flashman is once again at his irascible best.
The large varieties do not work well in the northern US due to their needs for a lengthy growing season, but you can grow the smaller versions. I prefer the store-bought versions.
Numbers are good tools, but some things are computationally reducible, and some not. Most interesting thing I've read recently. I had to read it three times to get the gist of it.
... we argued that even though at the most fundamental level numbers really aren’t involved, our sampling of what happens in the universe leads us to a description that does involve numbers. And in this case, the origin of the way we sample the universe has deep roots in the nature of our consciousness, and our fundamental way of experiencing the universe, with our particular sensory apparatus, place in the universe, etc.
What about the appearance of numbers in the history of science and engineering? Why are they so prevalent there? In a sense, like the situation with the universe, I don’t think it’s that the underlying systems we’re dealing with have any fundamental connection to numbers. Rather, I think it’s that we’ve chosen to “sample” aspects of these systems that we can somehow understand or control, and these often involve numbers.
In science—and particularly physical science—we have tended to concentrate on setting up situations and experiments where there’s computational reducibility and where it’s plausible that we can make predictions about what’s going to happen. And similarly in engineering, we tend to set up systems that are sufficiently computationally reducible that we can foresee what they’re going to do.
As I discussed above, working with numbers isn’t the only way to tap into computational reducibility, but it’s the most familiar way, and it’s got an immense weight of historical experience behind it.
But do we even expect that computational reducibility will be a continuing feature of science and engineering? If we want to make the fullest use of computation, it’s inevitable that we’ll have to bring in computational irreducibility. It’s a new kind of science, and it’s a new kind of engineering. And in both cases we can expect that the role of numbers will be at least much reduced...
While out on an anchorage Sunday we were awakened by thunder and hailstones + heavy rain on the roof around 11:30 pm. It was pitch black outside and we realized with the lightning flashes that the other three boats in the anchorage had fled to some safe port. Oh, and it had been such a mild sea breeze that we had left all of the hatches and eisenglass windows open.
What's your favorite cold summer sandwich? (I say cold to eliminate things like burgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese, and meatball grinders.)
Doing some reading, and musing, on this 245th year of the greatness which is our fine nation. Right now, we live in a world where we're supposed to be humble, and there are factions which would prefer to not tout American Greatness. Still others believe our best years are behind us. My view is some of our best years are behind us, but our very best is still ahead, as long as we understand where we've come from, and the principles for which we stand.
The delicious and refreshing Watermelons of today have