2014 « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Food / Drink ... Practical Advice ...

I will soon post a few thoughts on the 50th anniversary of the Stanley Kubrick’s “black comedy” film “Doctor Strangelove”. In this post, I will contest the notion that there was any real comedy in that film at all. At least not to anyone who ever had to consider the real possibility at some point in their life that they could get nuked! Literally!!! T’ain’t so funny then, McGee!!!

But before we launch the B-52’s, let me talk about a more domestic kind of “nuking”, and how I used a little shortcut over the weekend in a bread-baking project. I like to bake my own bread, especially since my own homebaked bread keeps the salt content low (for health reasons – and it tastes fine to me, a little more sweet and grassy than regular salty bread, but still bread). I make it by hand, as I don’t have a bread machine (no room left in my little apartment!).

Up to now I’ve followed standard bread recipes, where you first dissolve the yeast in a cup of hot water and sugar (around 110 degrees, I use a thermometer to get it right) and let it “proof” in the water for maybe 15 minutes. Then you pour that foamy blend into the flour bowl to start the mixing and kneading process. Or, you mix the yeast in with » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 1:31 pm Read Comments (3) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, June 21, 2014

◊ Hillary Clinton, VP 2016?

Politics ...

Relative to the next Presidential election, we’re still at a point where the conventional wisdom doesn’t mean much, where the unconventional could yet become the convention. Right now, the Democratic nomination is still Hillary Clinton’s for the asking. But some pundits have been doing thought experiments that challenge Hillary’s claim to the crown.

In a recent RCP article, Tom Bevan posed a list of 5 reasons why Hillary won’t (or shouldn’t) run. And to be honest, some of his reasons were pretty compelling. At bottom, Hillary isn’t such a good politician; she still gets uncomfortable in response to GOP carping about Bengazi, she becomes testy in response to challenging questions (such as the recent Diane Sawyer interview) and she has that habit of saying stuff that doesn’t play well (remember “what difference does it make”; a terrorist attack that killed top US diplomats doesn’t matter? Oh, and “we were dead broke”? After years of recession and millions who never got their jobs back?) She is not the skilled political figure that Bill Clinton was, and maybe still is.

(And now, according to a new book about the Clintons and Obamas called “Blood Feud”, Hillary’s health is worse than was thought, in that she is susceptible to blood clotting, fainting and stroke; admittedly, this could be GOP dis-information, but given the brain blood clot she previously experienced, the health question is another Hillary vulnerability.)

But HRC has a lot of assets too. She’s a strong centrist influence in a Democratic party swinging too far to the left to guarantee a plurality in a national election. And if she does NOT run, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 10:30 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Monday, June 16, 2014

◊ My Viewership — The Sun Never Sets on Britannia

Web Site/Blog ...

I use wordpress.com stats for my blog, and I recently took a look at the worldwide breakdown of where my views originate (and presumably where my viewers live). Here is a partial breakdown covering the past year or so:

USA: 30.8%
United Kingdom: 13.3%
Canada: 11.2%
Australia & New Zealand: 8.0%
India: 5.5%
Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore: 5.0%

Is there any common thread here? Well, at least 72% of my traffic comes from former British Empire colonies (or in case of the Philippines, a former colony of a former colony). So, my blog is a British Empire phenomenon!!!! To the degree that a handful of hits a day could be said to reflect a “phenomenon” . . .

Nonetheless, Hail Britannia!!! Perhaps I should have a gin and tonic, that great British colonial drink, to celebrate!!!!

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:22 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Friday, June 13, 2014

◊ Nanotech Trashes Human Race? (Or Good Old Fashioned Aggression?)

Science ... Society ...

I was talking about reviews of various things in my last post, so I will make another review tonight. This review involves an article in Real Clear Science, which in itself is a review of a conference report. The conference was about how humanity could go extinct by 2100. It was held in 2008 by the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.

This report identified 8 main ways of getting rid of us, making estimates of each extinction risk occurring over the next 85 years. These risk estimates range from 0.03% to 5% (which is fairly high, actually; the top four possibilities together combine to 12%, which is more than one chance in 10; although it might be argued that these probabilities are not completely additive). The Institute’s doomsday scenarios can be broken down into three major factors: war (regular war at 4%, nuclear war at 1%, and nuclear terrorism at 0.03%); disease (natural pandemic at 0.05% and the bigger risk of engineered pandemic at 2%); and surprisingly, nanotechnology (nanotechnology accident at 0.5%; nanotechnology non-accident: i.e., weaponized nanoparticles acting as an artificial engineered pandemic, 5%).

Oh, and throw in the risk of some uncontrolled machine-based intelligence taking over » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:31 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

◊ A Simple Observation About Complexity

Science ...

Here’s an almost Tweet-able thought that I had while making dinner yesterday evening. I was listening to a CD lecture from the Teaching Company on “Big History”, and the big professor (David Christian, who is definitely a smart cookie) was repeating one of his usual “big themes” from big history. I.e., that since the Big Bang, new forms of stuff seem to emerge over time that have increasing ability to concentrate energy flows, grow larger, interact, and perpetuate themselves or reproduce themselves. This applies (in something of a procession) to molecules, gas clouds, stars, planets, microbes, plants, animals, humans, tribes, villages, and civilizations. As things increase their abilities to concentrate energy and make their mark on reality, they tend to get more and more complex.

Ah yes, complexity!!! Another Teaching Company course subject. It makes me wonder . . . is there something fundamental about complexity, something inherent to it that causes things to be more able to gather more energy and do more stuff . . . or is complexity more of a side-show, more of an incidental thing? I tend now to believe the latter. If you had the talents and tools to build a wristwatch from scratch, you would appreciate how complex a wristwatch is. And yet, with those same tools and materials, you could build something else terribly complex that wouldn’t do anything.

And so, complexity doesn’t necessary bring more functionality. You can have complex things (like works of sculpture art) that can’t » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:38 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, June 7, 2014

◊ Yelp, Cookbooks and Old Boomers

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

I joined the ratings web site Yelp about about a year ago, and I put up a couple of reviews for some local establishments that I frequent. Given that I frequent them because I actually like these places, I gave them all good reviews on Yelp. Well, wouldn’t you know it . . . a few months later, Yelp took down all my reviews. I never got an explanation, but I have heard that Yelp puts every rater thru a credibility analysis, and if you give good ratings all the time, they decide that you must be getting paid or otherwise have a vested interest in promoting the places that you write about. So you get booted.

Well hey, Yelp . . . maybe I just wanted to tell the world about the good places, and not bother to bitch about the not-so-good (I mean, isn’t there enough bitching about life already?). Perhaps I like to commend, and I don’t enjoy criticizing. But I WILL now criticize Yelp; sure, they need to maintain credibility with their viewership, but in the process they make the assumption that every honest person is going to gripe on-line about their bad experiences. Honesty = bitchiness. People who just don’t like to complain, who like to share the good but perhaps keep the bad to themselves, just don’t fit into Yelp-world. I just don’t see this as a positive social trend; it is NOT an example of how modern technology is “bringing us all together” – just the opposite, I’d say. But that’s just me, I guess, living in the past.

Hey though, I could try to “modernize myself”, and perhaps I will start by doing a bad review here. I’m going to pan most recent versions of a famous cookbook, the » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:23 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

◊ Piketty and Bureaucracy

Current Affairs ... Economics/Business ... Personal Reflections ...

I intended to write a long, profound essay on Thomas Piketty’s news-making book release “Capital in the 21st Century” . . . but then I realized that I may not have all that much to add to the discussion. And there has been plenty of discussion on this book over the past few weeks (Salon, The Economist, Financial Times, NY Times, Wall St Journal, Forbes, NY Review of Books, etc.). Most of it is worth reading, quite erudite and long-sighted.

In a nutshell, Piketty has written a long tome about the historical economic trends of industrialized civilization over the past 4 centuries or so, addressing the overall question as to whether capitalism and free markets have made things better for the common, average person. Well, most people would have to agree that on average (with plenty of exceptions to the rule), the economic growth that capitalism has fostered raised the living standards of a majority of people in the industrialized nations, over the long term. The question really is, just who is getting the bigger share of free-market capitalism’s benefits; is the generated wealth being widely distributed, or is it being concentrated in the hands of a rich few? Do the long-run trends favor income equality and widespread opportunity, or are they increasing concentration of wealth in a tiny majority, with more and more people shut out from a chance at the good life?

As you might guess, the historical evidence on that is mixed; but Piketty seems to feel » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:58 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Monday, May 26, 2014

◊ Memorial Day, Passaic NJ

Photo ...

This photo shoot turned out to become an accidental tribute to Memorial Day, to remembering those who served and died in the wars that our nation has been involved in. There is a little park with a monument on a mini-hilltop in Passaic NJ that I have passed innumerable times since I was a baby, but never stopped to appreciate. So I decided to use the holiday to make a photo run to this little park. Well, it turned out that the monument is a veterans monument, and a parade and celebration event were underway. So I mingled around a bit and am sharing a few of the shots I took.

The monument appears to be focused on World War 2, but the designers allowed room around the top band for the inscription of future wars. Ironically, it came to good use; Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf (they haven’t yet updated it for Afghanistan). Let’s pray that it won’t need to be updated after that.

MORE PHOTOS: » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:11 pm Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 25, 2014

◊ Bombing Your Way Into the Heavens

Outer Space ... Society ...

One of my interests as a kid was space exploration and rocket launches. I grew up during the exciting days of the “space race” in the 1960’s, when the Soviets and the USA were competing to outdo each other in putting men into space and making machines sail to Mars or Venus (or even to the outer planets, such as the Pioneer 10 mission in 1972). Teachers would bring TV’s into classrooms on days when a manned Mercury or Gemini mission was to be launched, and we would interrupt our boring history or english classes to “join the countdown” at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Thus I became something of a space geek, reading up as much as I could about the US and Soviet space programs. Since my father worked for a defense contractor (Bendix Aerospace) that made stuff for certain NASA rockets and satellites, he would occasionally chat a bit with me about the latest space shots. (He didn’t really like to do it too much, though, as it sort-of put him on my level, or vice versa. My father had an old-school “I’m the boss and you’re the kid” parenting mentality. But not to complain, as he was relatively gentle about it, he wasn’t a tyrant. Nonetheless, he was definitely not like today’s parents, who want to be “friends” with their kids – and we’re now seeing just how well THAT turned out.)

So I was recently looking at some YouTube videos of rocket launches, reveling in the clipped, precise communications going on between the ground controllers and technicians, and the hushed sense of anticipation and danger that eventually gave way to the goose-bumping final countdown and » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 1:55 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

◊ Flight 370 Disappears Once Again — From Our Attention

Brain / Mind ... Current Affairs ... Psychology ...

It’s been over 8 weeks now since the mysterious disappearance of Flight 370, the Boeing 777 that turned west from its normal south-to-north flight path from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing, and diverted west then presumable south without any communications from the crew or passengers (via cell phone) as to what went wrong. Recall all the assertions that “we have probably found it”, which were soon thereafter retracted. Two days after the incident, oil slicks were spotted in the South China Sea that seemed to mark the spot. But no, military radar reviews showed that the plane headed the other way, to the Bay of Bengal.

There soon followed other various spottings of floating metal and plastic objects, debris fields and such that just must have been the result of a crash into the ocean. Then came the satellite pings and the analysis thereof, and most everyone was then sure that Flight 370 must have went down off the western coast of Australia. Underwater devices in that region soon heard signals that seemed likely to be from the homing device on the plane’s black box. Once again, the mystery was just about solved (at least as to where the plane wound up). But once again, this hot lead went cold, and many experts now doubt that those signals were from the black box.

In the first few weeks, press coverage of the Flight 370 search effort and incident analysis were almost non-stop; every new detail made the front pages. But after a month went by, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:55 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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