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We just sold my father’s home and one detail about it is stuck prominently in my mind. On the mirror in his bedroom, he had written in sharpie this strange phrase: “consonant and vowel, NO!” And I think now that maybe that represented an epiphany that hit him late in life. I have been reflecting…

wearing my other oakleys, in my other volvo that’s how they get ya I am, I confess, a consummate consumer. I care about the products that I buy, and I am very concerned about things like quality and durability and functionality and a little bit about design and aesthetics. also means that I’m probably one…

I thought I had posted this earlier, but i may have only posted it to Facebook or my professional page which is down at the moment. I’ve been working in Social Security Disability law since 2008, and as a solo attorney since 2014. Among my peers we monitor various numbers like “grant rates” and “backlogs”…

I keep failing to finish it so this is kind of a placeholder draft. Seems important to have something here. Top 10 books from the 21st-century that mindful people should read soon Today has been a travel day, and it seems to be the case that my travel days are always characterized by conversations about…

Is this chain: This is on my skid steer, which stopped driving correctly over a week ago, getting stuck with one drive wheel spinning freely and a broken chain. I bought the replacement chain, cut it to length, and got it looped around the sprockets, but I cannot for the life of me get it…

Something maybe too subtle for people to understand about my “love of government”: I do not for a moment believe that our government structure is ideal right now, or that we have consistently good leaders. I have very little trust in the efficacy of many/most structures within our government and limited confidence in the intentions…

Listening to a beautiful song, analyzing the patterns.   I think, “I could do that.” Melodies form in my mind constantly and while I always feared “accidentally copying” I come to realize that all melodic phrases are borrowed, and the math of it is that while combinations of “song length” are infinite, the combinations of…

It confuses people that I can talk about my father’s truly atrocious parenting and abuse, and all the damage that he did to me, while also talking about how I love, respect, and even miss him. It’s not Stockholm syndrome, it’s just family. Few things in life ever really conform to a rigid good/bad binary.…

I just finished watching Dark Matter, a science fiction show on Apple’s streaming service. It was very good. The premise of the show is centered around travel between alternate universes, based on the popular “choice driven” version of the multiverse hypothesis. In a little more detail, a scientist discovers a way to travel between alternate…

I am posting this now because someone asked a question on Facebook. So I have this basic pervasive, recurrent problem in life: I am significantly larger than the average or median human being, in at least two dimensions, which often leads to difficulty fitting in commercially designed spaces. this is not something that people who…

The Fermi Paradox is a thought experiment coined by physicist Enrico Fermi, who once pondered that if the conditions of life are common enough for there to be intelligent life in the universe, “where is everybody?” And this in turn is based on an idea called the Drake Equation. The Drake Equation is a bit…

You’ve probably seen this meme: And of course the caption tells us the point. We are supposed to take this as illustrating the idea that other perspectives are equally valid as our own. Let’s look at a real world example. Here we have a photograph of the meme situation: a figure painted on the ground…

A couple of highlights from things I’ve heard today. As I posted earlier, a client texted me this morning and after discussing his case, told me he hopes but I have a good social support system considering the stressful nature of what I do for a living, and of course I didn’t have much to…

“What if we could somehow limit voting to only people who could demonstrate actual understanding of the relevant issues and policies? Wouldn’t that be a solution to our toxic politics?” Arguably, it might be, and I found myself thinking about that a lot recently. Unfortunately, something nominally similar was tried once in the US, and…

I spent two hours on the phone with Apple today, and their techs cannot answer the following question: What conditions need to be met for my photos in the Photos app to upload to iCloud at full speed? I asked three senior technicians and not one was able to give me a clear answer. There…

I am rereading Dune, in light of my general personal crisis of feeling out of control about the world around me being too far lost to have hope of my making a difference. I’m trying to figure out why the story makes me feel so good and in essence, it is this idea that it…

Long overdue update. This is a place I call Jackson Acres. It’s my home in West Virginia, for a little over a year now. It’s been an incredibly eventful year in my life. I haven’t truly been settled down by any stretch of the imagination, spending on balance less than half of the past year…

I had a frustrating conversation recently. And sure, my fault. Anyway, I’ve got this friend who to me looks like they’ve got all of the symptoms of a new and growing syndrome of despair arising from social media manipulation. I don’t believe that there is a clinical term for it yet. But here’s the phenomenon:…

One major frustration that I ran into during the RV trip was digital storage. During the course of the trip, I shot enough photos and videos to fill up all the storage I had with me, including my 4tb MacBook Pro, my 2tb iPad, my 512gb iPhone, and the one external drive I had with…

Day one review of the 15 Pro Max: In short, yeah, it’s good. The dynamic island is way more of a benefit than I expected it to be. It certainly wasn’t the only possible way to accomplish this, but they made things like phone calls more unobtrusive (the old active call dialogue obscured much more…

Been a while since posting about the “homestead.” To catch you up: Last summer the circumstances of my life aligned to make moving out of Buffalo financially feasible for me. Basically, the housing market was so hot that I didn’t even have to bother making my house marketable or even fully cleaning it out. I…

This should not be possible. Behold, a Notification Center full only of spam push notifications. Each of these apps needs push notifications for a legitimate reason because of how the app is designed to work. Uber to let me know when my ride arrives, the fast food to let me know when my order is…

Perhaps my greatest disappointment along the journey of scientific discovery was when I learned the truth about what’s next in human evolution. What comes after humans? Science fiction and speculation has given us all sorts of exciting things. Trans-humanism ideas like mind transfer into immortal computers. Or maybe just super intelligent AI. Maybe genetic modification…

I tried to set this up so that my friends could easily create accounts to comment. But as always happens with spam protection efforts, it turns out that while the hackers have no problem getting around the spam protection measures to create accounts for unknown malice, my actual friends report that nobody can figure it…