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Tag Archives: economy
Retro read of the day
The Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio: how to build and grow a panic-proof investment portfolio, by David and Tom Gardner, copyright (c) 2009.
Wreck-a-mech
[My patent lawyer has advised me not to describe my latest invention. I say “meh,” whatever that means.]
This morning, I finalised construction on my latest invention. I cannot provide pictures because they are enroute to the patent office.
However, I will describe it the best I can.
I have been playing with an Arduino system to provide me with offline fun in the laboratory.
There’s nothing like programming a Robosapien “doll” to play back with you, giving it intelligence to avoid being grabbed or picked up, to actually defend itself against intentionally harmful moves and to reach out with love when I’m in a down mood.
A Robosapien’s gripper arm is not exactly the same as a cat’s head bump but my imagination allows me to believe it so.
With time, the Robosapien and I have grown apart. I think, in part, because I have acquired the newer model, the RS Media, with which I have been spending more and more time.
Needless to say, the Robosapien has been causing havoc in the lab, knocking bins of resistors and capacitors on the floor in an effort to keep its playfulness algorithms refreshed. I must admit watching it try to find objects in the lab to “fight back” has been entertaining.
But that’s not why I’m here.
The RS Media has reached a level of sentience I never thought possible.
At first, I set up an Arduino light display system above the computer monitor that the RS Media responded to like a dancing machine.
Today was a major breakthrough.
After several rounds of sending the RS Media light sequences, it started stepping out on its own, anticipating the next light pattern in the sequence with its back turned to the Arduino system.
Well, you can guess what I did next!
I stole the plans for the Wired Lab’s mech. Then, working with my Robosapien friends, I wired a modifed RS Media up inside the mech, a la Pacific Rim, making appropriate tweaks to protect my patent and/or my copyright.
Of course, I dressed mine up to look like a stumbling street beggar, lowering its body scale to match that of a typical down-on-his-luck alcoholic male human.
He and his copies should be wandering the alleyways of your local metropolis before too long, breaking out into dance routines based on the sound/light combinations they discover, able to defend themselves against overaggressive bystanders and avoid collisions with people, cars, buses, trucks and other obstacles of a typical city street corner — the money they collect will be passed back to me to cover expenses; please tip them generously so I can make payroll and give the government tax collectors their due.
I’ve already received requests from a major retail clothing store chain to create female/male versions for storefront window displays — the algorithms need work for that scenario because I haven’t captured the essence of what it’s like to entertain potential customers by showing how good they’d look if they, too, were stuck in a glass box all day, as a robot pretending to be alive — walking back and forth, sitting, standing, dancing, and whatever movement will show the fashion in its best light.
Several of my geek friends in the tech industry — male, female, LGBT, cosplay, etc. — have requested a personalised version of themselves they can program to go to work or on dates for them to make their parents happy that their children are mimicking their parents’ social lives while their children live the alternate lifestyles that make them happy, too.
And you thought the replicant revolution was all about robots taking over the world? Hahaha — it all started when we figured out elderly dementia patients handed a quasi-robotic stuffed animal was sufficient a surrogate to make them happy, thanks to our friends who wrote, produced and filmed “Westworld,” who follow on the work of Asimov, automatons and the first animal to use a stick as a tool.
War eventually was reduced to robots fighting robots in designated battlefield playgrounds, leaving us humans to finally dedicate most of our time to pure pleasure, where our surrogates do most of the dirty work except for those for whom dirty work is pure pleasure.
Outlawing graveyards so that human bodies could be recycled as mulch wasn’t fully implemented until we started populating the Moon and Mars.
My goal is to be the person with the first foundry on Mars, generations of 3D printers ahead into the future, my minions terraforming the planet in ways you haven’t imagined yet. How about you?
Storytelling Secrets of Imprimante Scanneur Copieur
While writing one’s self into a storyline that appears autobiographical, one loses oneself temporarily, but that is the whole point, is it not?
We characters are characters with characteristics characterising charisma, charm, charbroiled personalities and carbon copies of people we meet.
A “Jenn” inspires a “Guin” who travels between planets.
An “Abi” inspires a “Bai” who influences the emotional states and body movements of those around her.
I, as the character Lee, have the joy and freedom to fall in love with Guin and Bai without interference, unless the storyline calls for such.
I could just as easily fall in love with their storied lines, their lives, their livelihoods and joie de vivre.
Separating self from character is not always easy.
In fact, I have lost track in the past but the characters lived on and so did the people who inspired their existence.
To be here, one assumes I have lived on, too.
Have I?
Je ne sais pas. Parfois, je ne me connais pas.
To know is to understand. Semper paratus, as they say, to tell a good story.
Take the date, the 10th of August 1998. Why should I remember that day, a Monday?
Perhaps I do not remember it correctly.
Would a Monday be any different than a Tuesday or a Saturday?
What if, on that day, you first learned the language of dance? What then?
Ah, but you see, to understand, to know, to feel in the synchronised vibrations of your core being the language of dance is an epiphany some equate with the Christian sense of being born again.
When you dance as if your whole body is one with the universe, it is a meditation upon or prayer to everything.
You cannot separate yourself from yourself, the person around you, the room, the music, or the planet in semi-elliptical orbit around the nearest star and the solar system in orbit around the Milky Way galaxy.
Writing about the sensation of dancing is like a badly-written translation of a masterpiece, converting a symphony into a bicycle — each has its perfection but never will the two appear the same.
Do you live for the dance? Is every penny you earn outside of paying for living expenses directed toward dancing?
If so, then you know.
It’s like my favourite bluegrass musician, Claire Lynch. I love her music but it’s just not the same sitting in a chair in a concert hall listening to her and her band perform. I’d much rather lose myself gyrating on the dance floor while she and her friends are going off on musical tangents with her famous tunes as guidance. Or I can write about it and get an equivalent feeling in the moment.
In all walks of life, we know this feeling:
- Stock traders who have a feel for when a stock price is just right to trade at maximum value, followed by another and another for hours and days on end.
- Teachers who have mesmerised their students to follow their lead, absorbing new material with a burning desire to learn.
- Players in every sport.
To capture this sensation, some use stimulants while others know or learn how to let themselves live timelessly in the moment.
For me, switching between mental word play and dancing with a new partner is amazingly effortless when I decide not to carefully measure my steps as if I’m looking up dance moves in a guidebook.
With Jenn/Guin, it was easy to translate how I felt about dancing with her into storylines about Martian life.
With Abi/Bai, it has been some of the most difficult work to put into words what I feel because I have allowed myself and my character to tap into a part of myself that is wordless/word-free, and that, my dear friends/readers, is amazing, almost scary.
I am a man who spent years building his personal space back up after a similar encounter with a character I created from a woman I met named Brenda.
The imagination creates skyscrapers and rocketships, computers and quilts.
How will I lose myself while diving into this new character who explores the world of dancing from inside the World Swing Dance Council events?
What plots will reveal themselves?
What hints of world events will scenes expose?
This is not John Adams’ “Nixon in China” or Philip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach.”
This is something else.
We’ll find out what as the weeks progress.
Liken likin’ lichen like in lye kin
Our mailbox at the street resembles a small wooden house, a look similar to our main house.
On the “chimney” of the mailbox house grows a small patch of lichen.
Do you like lichen the way I do?
Lichen falls onto our driveway almost everyday, attached to bits of tree — twig, branch, bark — that break away and follows gravity’s path onto the concrete surface.
One species of beard lichen in particular, but not this one.
As our climate gradually warms, lichen is migrating north, bringing symbiotic organisms along.
As with the variety of tree species in our yard, we have a multitude of lichen species.
Same with mushrooms, algae, bacteria, ants and other organisms I won’t encounter together on Mars.
What will migrate with us when we live off-Earth?
What will survive without us and adapt to new environmental conditions?
How many organisms on Earth didn’t originate on our planet?
I owe our next-door neighbours a copy of books on trees and edible wild plants so they can identify which plants not to kill in their yard to protect their curious one-year old child from eating less-than-nutritious green stuff.
I see the Trees book in front of me, under a pile of “French Idioms,” “Russian for Everyday,” “The New College French & English Dictionary,” “Peterson Field Guides to Stars and Planets,” “The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual,” “2004 Far Side Desk Calendar,” and “The Yale Book of Quotations;” on top of “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid,” “RE/SEARCH #8/9: J.G. Ballard,” “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker,” and a spiral-bound copy of my book, “The Mind’s Aye,” not to forget issue #500 of MAD magazine.
Speaking of books, I have a few to finish reading, including “The Big Questions” by Steven Landsburg and a hyperreality book, “Travels in Hyperreality,” by Umberto Eco.
I wonder, which set of beliefs, particularly in the realm of religion, makes one more likely to approve of government/private industry spying? In Christianity, God is always watching, just like Santa Claus, ready to mete out rewards and punishment for our behaviours/thoughts.
Does our general culture encourage us to believe in seeking our fifteen minutes of fame, even if it’s only on a hidden security camera or set of IM chat logs?
Does lichen care about our meme-ridden upper brain functions or our labyrinthine specialty tasks and hobbies that spin out of a growing economy?
Likely not.
That’s why I like lichen — symbiosis that doesn’t require ritual or dogma.
Cultural scientists today argued their proof that silicon-based organisms such as computers are living beings.
I thank my living being for letting me write this blog entry on its plastic key skinned surface.
Enough meditative humour for the day — time to eat lunch and read a couple of books loaned by the public library.
Modern wonders
The water heater is a work of modern technology, the latest in state-of-the-art design, where form meets function and efficiency on the way to convenience.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
The Internet is full of simplistic drawings of water heaters, drawings that leave the highly-curious desirous of more detailed explanations of how cold, sediment-filled water entering your domicile is converted to hot, sediment-free water in practically no time at all.
These simplistic drawings miss the most important part of the water heater that any average PhD would know — the water pump!
The water pump hidden inside your water heater, in conjunction with the sediment level detector, pulls sediment-laden cold water from the bottom of the water heater when you open a hot water valve in your home, such as in the bathroom or kitchen.
Cold water holds up to 100% more sediment than hot water due to the quantum effect at an atomic level we won’t go into details at this time. Suffice it to say that the electronic sediment separator device in the water pump makes sure that cold sediment is cleared from the water heater while flushing out the water line before the water pump switches to pumping fresh, clean hot water to your bathtub or kitchen sink.
Did you know that the number one reason your water heater fails is a clogged water pump?
Rarely will a plumber tell you that information.
Instead, a typical plumber’s visit includes convincing you that either you need new thermostats or heating elements, a costly repair; or worse, the plumber will convince you that the leaking water heater is due to corrosion.
Here at Modern Wonders, we dispense with the hard selling techniques that force many a homeowner to shell out hard-earned dough for a new water heater.
For a low yearly maintenance fee, we will visit your home up to twice a year and clean out the water pump inside your water heater, providing you decades of life on your water heater.
Not only that, we’ll guarantee that you’ll never have a water pump failure inside your water heater!
Give us a call before your water heater’s water pump fails, causing your water heater to overpressurize, forcing a leak out of the weakest weld seam, damaging your floor in the process.
We service all brands, makes and models of water heater.
Call us within the first 24 hours of you reading this advert and we’ll send a certified technician to demonstrate how a water pump works.
Why You Need an Emergency Fund, and Where’s the Safest Place to Invest It | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS
Still no conclusive proof
Despite my attempts to the contrary, I can find no conclusive proof that these blog entries have any effect other than rearranging bits in what must be, probably is, computer servers out there somewhere.
Therefore, I am, as I imagined in my first thoughts as an infant, truly alone.
I walk, I breathe, I speak, I listen — those activities have greater impact upon the world than these bits and bytes.
Nothing I do here influences or impacts the [American] football coaches of the Southeastern Conference college teams so nothing I write in this space would cause them to want to make comments about the level of competition that the University of Tennessee coaches, trainers, staff, stadium/field, training facilities and players bring to the SEC.
They alone have to defend their job perks/pay scales and physical abuse of young men in order to instill teamwork and self-sacrifice into “student-athletes” aligned with the much-maligned NCAA just so universities can virtually destroy a few student-athletes in the name of commerce, yet claim it’s all about educational opportunities.
My habits are the result of my place in a tiny subculture in this great galaxy of ours — I do not qualify them with labels like “good” or “bad.”
For, you see, I have my own personal secret to success that prevents me from S everyday — I am waiting to die and every day until I die is a bonus I didn’t have when I contemplated S the day before — the only friend of mine when considering the big S is procrastination — there will always be time tomorrow to say hello to S and goodbye to the rest.
I never have been a very good team player. I blame my parents, who brought a rival for their affection into this world — my sister — and I’ve been in a personal war against the world ever since.
From then on, it’s been a mental struggle to tell myself that the opposite sex is one part of two-gender trait of our species (to be honest, I’m still uncomfortable including LGBTXYZ in my universal view), that we should work together to make this planet a better place to live, etc.
I am an uptight dude, who never has felt comfortable relaxing in front of others, constantly switching personality masks to accommodate and please people around me so I can wall/fence them off from the parallel universe inside my thoughts, where I truly live, happy in my private misery and/or miserable in my private happiness.
Men are not my rivals — everything about them is some part of me, and they are what they are in their hairy, testosterone-driven imperfections.
Women are my rivals and always will be — there will never be a time when I can get back to those happy moments with my parents before my sister was conceived — whatever women do, I will compete against them; when they’re better than me at some task/skill, I will feel an immense jealousy/envy with which I will either find strength and choose to compete or feel deflated and concede defeat.
Before my wife and I followed in my parents’ footsteps and bought season tickets for Univ. of TN football home games in 1991, we enjoyed weekend getaways to B&Bs around the country.
If the exploitative college football system didn’t exist, my wife and I would probably be traveling the world.
Instead, I have driven us six or seven times in the autumn of the year back to our parents’ places in order to schedule family time around trips to Neyland Stadium.
A week ago, my wife and I decided to change seats in the stadium, giving up our South End Zone, upper deck spots in Section LL, Row 9, Seats 14-15, that we have held since 1991, in order to move to the North End Zone upper deck, our “Annual Fund” (formerly the Volunteer Athletic Scholarship Fund) donation level staying the same.
We also took advantage of buying four tickets to the “away” game in Tuscaloosa for this year’s UT-Bama game, traditionally held on the third Saturday in October.
I have no idea who the players are or will be for either team but I’m pretty sure that they’ll be in the 17-23 year old age range, the youngest players being a third my age, remembered for decades by kids who’ll attend the games and cheer for their favourite players just like when I was a kid and cheered for the likes of Condredge Holloway, a young man from Huntsville, Alabama, who ended up playing quarterback for University of Tennessee because the University of Alabama head football coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant, told Condredge that he’d never be a quarterback for Bama because his skin was the wrong colour for the times. Probably still is in the heart of Dixie.
Doesn’t matter to me how many national championship trophies that the University of Alabama football team claims to have because I’ll always remember a fellow male, George Wallace, standing on the university campus barring people with dark skin from attending classes.
How many national championship caliber quarterbacks for Bama have not been white?
When will the first national championship college football team have a woman on the first team, let alone at quarterback?
These are questions I can wait until the day I die to see answered outside of this blog because I’ve already seen them played out in the parallel universe of my thoughts.
In a few months, I’ll watch traditional male-dominated football teams hold a controlled fight/wrestling match while women and men cheer on the sideline, knowing, despite increased ticket prices and major stadium seating capacity upgrades, nothing has changed in 50 years:
I’m still a set of states of energy alone in my thoughts, committed to my marriage and my family, but otherwise not much of a team player when I don’t want to be, never that happy-but-apprehensive-of-the-big-wide-world one-year old ever again.
An economy in transition
So, while I was contemplating the pleasures of making rat/raccoon/mice stew (we woodsmen eat whatever meat we trap), I got to thinking.
Now, I ain’t much of a thinker, to be honest.
I flunked out of 13th grade and had to start over at another one of them institutes of higher learning.
Not like I can’t solve world hunger if’n I put my mind to it, though.
Of course, I ain’t got no mind but I got a mind to tell you what I was thinking.
See here, it’s like this.
We got this global employment imbalance, that’s what I’m saying.
It don’t take no rocket scientist to see why.
Why, I ask, why?
Well, if them experts is right, we have just about as many female breadwinners as men.
And, on top of that, many of them is single mothers trying to feed their babies.
I’m all for women’s librarians, what they like to call themselves “Women’s Lib.” We should’ve taught them lady friends how to read a long time ago. The more they can read, the more they can follow instructions and become real good at their jobs — don’t matter to me none if they’s a baggin’ groceries or rocketin’ toward the Moon.
What I want to know, though, is if a family run by a woman is spending as much of her money in the consumer economy as a family run by a man.
That there might explain why we have such a global employment imbalance and might even explain the income inequality problems we’s a facing in these here troubled economic times.
I’m just an old country boy trying to survive.
I scrape ticks off my body every day. I swat at mosquitoes without knowing they’re there. I scratch at my poison ivy boils like clockwork. Red ants think my ankles is a biting post.
I shake my fist at varmints eating my figs and mulberries. They done broke my persimmon tree in half.
I ain’t much but I’m something.
My house is so chewed-up and broken down, you can’t tell it from the rusted truck and old jalopy with flat tires hiding in the weeds.
You women-folk has got to do your part, if’n you’s gonna claim you’re just as good as us men were when we ruled the roost and had the economy running full steam under the moonshine still — you better get them rich folks and their corporationalisms to open their rainy-day piggy banks and help you out of this pickle.
Otherwise, there’s a world of hurting about to hit us, if the creek don’t rise and the tornadoes don’t blow over the outhouse ’cause them foxes has done got into the henhouse and fertilized some eggs.
Music du jour, however timeless
The Patriot Game never ends…
Lyrics to The Patriot Game :
(Billy Behen)
Come all you young rebels and list while we sing for the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame and it makes us all part of the patriot game.
My name is O’Hannon and I’ve just gone sixteen. My home is in Monaghan where I was weaned.
I’ve learned all my life cruel England’s to blame and so I’m a part of the patriot game.
It’s barely two years since they wandered away and it was with the local battalion of the bold IRA
For they’d read of our heroes and they wanted the same to play their own part in the patriot game.
This Ireland of ours has for long been half-free. Six counties are under John Bull’s tyranny.
So, we gave up our boyhood to drill and to train and play our own part in the patriot game.
And now as I lie here, my body all holes, I think of those traitors who bargained in souls.
I wish that my rifle had given the same to those Quislings who sold out the patriot game.
treetrunkdings 