So, Velikovsky May Have Been Right After All

Some scientists at Caltech think there might be nine planets (ten if you count poor Pluto). (www.gizmag.com/solar-system-nine-planets-caltech/41423/) Velikovsky spent most of his adult life insisting that there was a tenth planet and that the inhabitants of it had uplifted humankind from apes in order to mine gold for them back in ancient Babylon. Just watch Ancient Astronauts if you want to know more about that scenario.

UPDATE: As my friends Chuck Puckett and Shelley  Wilmoth pointed out on Facebook, I misremembered who it was that was hypothesizing the Ancient Aliens. It was Zecharia Sitchin that wrote about Nibiru, the twelfth planet. Immanuel Velikovsky wrote Worlds In Collision. That will teach me to do my research before I rip off a blog post.

Nielsen TV Ratings on Facebook?

I heard a news item on Marketplace last night (http://www.marketplace.org/2016/01/20/world/media-ratings-agency-pushes-new-ground) about Nielsen scanning Facebook and other social media for mention of TV shows. I immediately wondered how sophisticated their algorithms were and whether my mention of the Big Bang Theory in other contexts might add to the show’s already gargantuan ratings. Not that I’d mind.

The Blogger Experiments

It has been over two weeks since I wrote a blog post. There are a number of reasons but they all sound more like excuses than valid reasons to me. Rather than be hard on myself, I have decided to try an experiment. I am going to start mixing short posts with the longer, essay length posts. The idea behind this is, if I start writing a short post, it might grow into a longer one.

I’m also going to try to post more than just one post a day. This should be easier given that I am giving myself permission to make short posts. I hope this makes this blog easier to read.

I ought to mention that this idea arose from a conversation that I had with my friend Bob. His advice was to open the editor and type “I have nothing to say.” Then, he reasoned, I would sit there and say to myself, “I can’t post that!” and come up with something better than that to say. I am doing that very thing but I’m skipping the first step. I’m lazy that way.

Ham Radio Experiment

Yesterday I transmitted on ten meters for the first time. I used two different radio transmission modes that I hadn’t tried before. One was continuous wave or CW which is what hams use to transmit Morse code. The other was Single Sideband or SSB which is a technique for compressing speech into half the space on the air.

The ironic thing was that, due to numerous factors, no one heard me. Notice, I said I transmitted on ten meters, not that I had made a contact. The frustrating part is that my friend Bob was listening for my signal. Ironically, we were texting each other with our smart phones trying to get the radio to work.

We have so many more options for communications today than even ten years ago. There are cell phones and the internet that allow everyone the opportunity to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. It changes the way that we think about ourselves and others. When one method of communication doesn’t work, there are several others that present themselves to get the job done.

We will try again with a different antenna. Since the radio is installed in my car, I may try moving to a different location to see if we can make a contact that way. Once we do get it to work, I’ll have added a couple of more ways to communicate, not only with my friend Bob, but with new friends I make from around the world.

Christmas Eve 2015

It is Christmas Eve 2015. I measure time in birthdays and Christmases. In my case that ends up being exactly six months apart. Birthdays happen in the summer for me. Christmas is the apex of winter. Actually, it comes just a few days after the winter solstice which marks the beginning of winter in the northern hemisphere but I still think of it as the height of the winter season.

My mother’s birthday was on the winter solstice. She got a rough deal because of that as a child. Everyone always gave her a combined birthday and Christmas present. My brother and father and I were always sure to make the distinction when we celebrated her birthday though. It must have colored  her perception of the year though, I’m sure. She didn’t have two milestones six months apart to divide her years neatly in two like I did. Consequently it may have never occurred to her to divide the year up in that fashion.

Memories of Christmas are mixed for me. Lately they have been less joyous than they were when I was young. I think this is because it has become a time of year where there are exceptional demands on the finances and money is always in short supply.

In late January or early February I get my annual bonus at work. It is dependent on stock performance the previous year but our stock has been performing well so dependably that I have come to depend on it.

Then, a few weeks later, there’s income tax return. I had one unpleasant brush with the IRS after which I made sure that I always pay more than I am going to owe so that I always get a substantial return. This is also something upon which I have come to depend.

I have been making an effort to change my perception of Christmas to more of a time of cherishing family and reflecting upon the good things that have happened in the year that we are wrapping up. It is easier said than done but I am stubborn and so I have hope of achieving this goal.

Tuesday Ramble

I am happy that I am finally getting some readers for my blog. I guess Facebook is good for something after all. I wish that Facebook would respect hyperlinks though. I often use them like footnotes so that I don’t have to stop and explain myself in the middle of a story. Since Facebook only allows a single link and apparently WordPress uses that one to link back to your WordPress blog, I don’t have that option.

I’ve been thinking about how to adapt my style to be less dependent on hyperlinks. I’m not really going to use footnotes. That would be a little bit too stilted. I tried putting URLs in parenthesis but Facebook cuts them out as well. I’ll keep trying experiments until I find something that works. Luckily I haven’t felt the need to hyperlink anything today.

I have been waiting for a check in the mail. I still have Christmas shopping to do. I’m afraid the check may have been lost. It’s not that I can’t get a replacement check, just that it will put a severe crimp in my holiday celebration if it doesn’t get her soon. I have been hanging around the house all week waiting for the mail to come. I have been getting stuff done around the house but it wasn’t how I planned to spend this week.

This post has been a bit of a ramble. I have been trying to write cohesive posts but my mind is not very cohesive today. I am going to wrap up this post and then go play my lovely new guitar. That is the best therapy for cohesion that I can think of. (of which I can think?) Sometimes you have to throw grammar out the window and write the way you talk.

Challenges of Preparing a Class

First, a quick note for my Facebook readers. You might want to click through to my blog. I tend to put hyperlinks to related pages in my blog posts and these don’t seem to show up on Facebook. Consequently, when I put a link to Airtable in my last post (http://airtable.com/), some Facebook readers didn’t realize that I was talking about a program that I was using as opposed to one that I wrote myself. Now on to today’s post.

I am developing a class on how to build and program a robot. It is intended as a follow-on class for people who have already taken the class on building simple circuits and writing programs to control them with the Arduino. For those of you that haven’t yet encountered the Arduino, it is a small computer, roughly the size of a credit card, that is easy to learn to program and has the necessary hardware to control a lot of different hardware circuits. Some of the early projects that most people do while learning to build things with an Arduino are flashing LEDs and buzzing buzzers. It is also able of controlling servos which are often used to provide robots with wheels.

It is going to be challenging to put together a class that meets all of the criteria that have been set for me. It needs to be about two or three hours of instruction. Check. It needs to have a budget for lab materials of roughly $15. Ouch! That is going to be challenging. Also making it interesting for a variety of ages is going to be its own challenge. I’ve got a rough draft and I’m still shopping for lab materials. I think it is doable. I’ll just have to be a little bit clever. I’m excited.

Teaching an Old Dog a New Trick

And so my Christmas break begins. The large aerospace company for which I work is primarily a manufacturing company. As such it can’t afford to keep the lines running when over half of the employees are taking vacation so, to keep everyone happy, we get one less week of vacation than other companies and instead, the company starts the Christmas holidays on Christmas eve and carry it on through New years day. This year that means that by taking four days of vacation I can be off for seventeen days. That is a good deal.

In past years I have started the break with the best of intentions but usually by the time January rolls around, I haven’t achieved any of the plans that I made at the beginning of the break. This year I’m starting the break. With the help of a nifty little application called Airtable I have come up with a super todo list to support a new strategy I have come up with. I have created a list of tasks. Each task has a group of tags associated with it, like “domestic” or “chore” or “ham radio” or “artistic” or “musical”. It also has a status, and a completion date. Every task starts with a status of “TODO” and a completion date that is blank. When I complete a task, I change it’s status to “Done” and fill in the completion date.

I can create multiple views of the list and each list can apply a filter that determines which items are shown. For instance, I have one view with a filter that only shows tasks with a status of “TODO”. Another view only shows tasks with a status of “Done”. I can create a view with a filter that shows tasks with a completed date after a start date and before an end date. This allows me to keep track of what I do and when. The plan is to try to balance the things that I do that are chores with the things that I do that are recreational. That way, I can feel like I accomplished something in both domains at the end of the Christmas break. I’ll update you next year and let you know how it worked.

A Philosophical Ramble (tl;dr?)

I read a blog post that my friend Dave Winer wrote. (By the way, go read it or else this post won’t make much sense to you.) At least I consider him my friend. I don’t really know him. We haven’t sat down face to face and talked. But I feel like I know him. I have read his blog for fifteen or twenty years, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember exactly how long. I have benignly stalked him on the internet. I was curious to find out more about this person that wrote so engagingly and had so many interests similar to mind.

I discovered that we were almost the same age. His birthday is a month or so before mine. We grew up in the same era. He grew up in New York, Michigan, and Silicon Valley, as far as I’ve been able to determine from reading his writing and what the bibliographical information that I’ve been able to dig up on him says. On the other hand, I grew up in Paducah, KY, Carbondale, IL and Huntsville, AL. Even so, we apparently have many things in common, e.g. programming, liberal politics, and an interest in communications.

But I don’t really know him. I would like to know him better. But when you get right down to it, nobody ever really knows anyone. The best you can expect is that the people around you know some part of you. We tend to think that people are the same from moment to moment when actually we are constantly evolving, becoming someone else. The person that someone comes to know becomes someone else. Or do they?

I think, I am myself but the very concept of self is questionable. Am I, myself, the same person that I perceived myself to be ten minutes ago? How about an hour ago? A day, a week, a month? Who were all those people? What happened to them? Are they still a part of who I am now? If I forget something that happened to me, do I lose a part of myself? These are profound questions. If I struggle to know myself, how can I expect that anyone else can know me?

When someone writes a kind piece about the aspects of you that they remember, it is to be cherished. They are not eulogizing you. You are not dead yet. They are telling the things that they know about you, the things that you have shown them of the self you were when they knew you. I understand the desire to be known for who you have become. But does that mean you should deny who you have been?

By the way, Dave, I have been following your new work. I’ve been learning from you. I was as blown away by Electron as you were. Thanks for the tip. I was working on a single page web app written in Javascript that I moved over to Electron when I saw how easy it was to do. I haven’t followed your work as closely lately as I did for a while. But I’m back reading your posts daily now. I’m even blogging regularly myself.

I don’t know what my Facebook followers are going to thing about this post (both of them :-)). Maybe they’ll think a little bit about identity and friendship the way you have incited me to do. Thanks for your presence in the world, the work you do, and the part of you that I have come to know. I can hope for more but I will treasure all that you give us.