My family in a nutshell

"... who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round."

--Marcel Proust,  Du cote de chez Swann, translated by Moncrieff

 

While reading a retrospective of 1960's SF, I found this line by John Boston:

" Ben Bova, whom I am beginning to think of as the 60-cycle hum of Amazing,..."

Some authors cannot be summed up in a single line; many can; and that comes damn close to encapsulating Ben Bova in a nutshell.

"As a dog returns to its vomit, a fool comes back to his folly"

"A man might write such stuff for ever, if he would but abandon his mind to it".
---Samuel Johnson

'"Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit."

"Of all things I have loved and lost, I miss my mind the most."

I started blogging in 2005 as it seemed the next interesting step from having a homepage.
I thought it would be cool to show off what I was doing, brag about my accomplishments and interact with strangers. This was, of course, back when meeting strangers was interesting, and not a masochist exercise in dodging shitheads and rage monkeys. (Parenthetically now, I have a new respect for women on dating apps having to deal with dick pics)
And the thing about constantly dodging a barrage of feces and dicks?  Makes it difficult to think about anything else: now all I ever want to do is complain.

Up until then, the Internet had been a continuous stream of meeting interesting people! People all over the world! Describing the things I do, and talking about the things I thought about seemed like fun!

That is not the case now.

Some of the things I might have talked about became self-censored. As anonymity evaporated, posts became increasingly PR oriented.  Bland, flavorless pap.

Think about it! 

Do you want your boss reading about how you blew all the windows out of a 1980 Pinto using a device made from electrical junk and a wading pool?
Do you want your dating pool to shrink because you wrote ten thousand words on your comfort food activity of watching 'William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet' and 'The Crow' back to back while eating popcorn soaked with maple syrup?
Do you want your mother's hoity-toity friend to get bent IRL because you verbally crushed her son in a IRC argument over Gillain Anderson Nude fakes?

Well, no.

I have argued before that networks- and information - is more valuable when scarce. I don't have the chops to chase that intuition down and quantify it, but while I think the early Internet had better, sparser, links, the new tightly webbed one is less desirable in a lot of ways.*

Analytics.
I don't care if Zuckerberg knows I have a poor regard for him** , but I do care if Youtube thinks its a good idea to suggest a constant stream of anti-feminist, gun-worship or pro-bigot videos. Something in my patchwork of interests provokes this. I don't know what: amateur chemistry, watching 'Forgotten Weapons', researching UFOs.***

But I am tired of it.
The world is full of poorly made, over-hyped 'algorithms', and the more in their databases the worse they seem to get. Show me videos that a well-read middle aged guy with a interest in science and weird tales would like, and I'd be happy.
So presenting lots of data isn't improving my experience, and the Net just seems like a more horrible and toxic thing every day.

I understand there is a lot of things that can be done to rebuild anonymity. But there is a lot of really well paid or really well motivated people hammering away at that. Criminals. Dictators. Corporations. We are plankton to those Leviathans**** , and how much of my life and time do I want to burn trying to become unpalatable?

Its easier just to dodge the baleen by growing legs and crawling up on the shore.

Today I looked at my bannerhead and realized I wasn't writing about any of the above.
I realized every time I started to write something, (and there are many aborted drafts) it was just a whiny screed about how things were all shite, and that is what even this post is becoming too.

So on occasion, if I want to write and publish something, I will do it with a one-time, throw-away blog or forum post. I will tag it under 'Radiopsychedelica' which still seems to be a rare enough search term to be useful. I won't delete this blog because I have a natural archivists abhorrence of words vanishing, even poor words.

 "And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates:"  is not my style, thanks. 

 

So after much consideration,

This blog is closed.

*Marshall Mcluhan remarked on the institution of a Global Village, but never carried on to point out that in a village everyone knows everything about everyone, and only conformity is possible.


**Whereas I think Elon Musk wants to be Tony Stark, but is at best Justin Hammer.*****

***I really can't imagine what I did to get the constant stream of 'X but every time Y it speeds up' and 'White guy speaks Chinese' videos.

****Yes, that is a Hobbes reference.

*****You want to argue this? Really? Why don't we just fact-check what Musk has actually done himself and not just paid somebody to do and compare that to a fictional character.  And then, get a life. Both of us. This is EXACTLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE INTERNET.

"I am a patient boy; I wait, I wait, I wait..."

Ran across this breathtaking gem today while searching for something else:*

"What makes bibtex superior over Endnote and Citavi is, that Bibtex was invented by the UNIX Community. It is working on the command line. Before somebody can use Bibtex, he has to become a UNIX expert, which means he needs to be familar with the C programming language, the Linux kernel and textformatting tools like sed, grep and awk." **

So...in order to use what is well described as a very useful and well designed footnoting tool, a hapless paper writer has to become a Unix expert?

I am not going to comment on the ramifications of the idea that a bibliographic reference should demand familiarity with grep.

*Which I can't talk about because it would derail my indignation.

Charles Parnell may have invented it, but Captain Boycott got all the credit

Most boycotts these days seem to have little effect.
After all, the eponymous event was a 'powerless local many' versus the 'locally powerful few', rather than the 'small socially conscious' vs the 'powerful, global few' which is today's version. The Peoples Republic of China, for instance, may be a festering hell, but we can't convince enough people to stop purchasing their trade goods to actually make an impact.*
At best, a small percentage of our population will function as Conscientious Objectors, and in the end have as little impact as Conscientious Objectors ever have.
So lets consider a possible leverage.
Trade goods are not bought and sold overnight. The backbone of  global trade is the humble steel containers, stacked on cargo ships crawling across the oceans: 5152 vessels devoted to containers alone. (Another 16,000 'general cargo' ships are also registered.)
The number of containers isn't really tracked, but its something on the order of 20,000,000 units at any time.
To fill, move and unload these containers take time.
The ocean crossing (Hong Kong to North America) takes about 20 days. Add five days at each side to clear customs and get off the docks. Another couple of days in transit to warehouse, and then an unknown warehouse period until it reaches the actual retail shelves.
The delay is interesting, because this means product is ordered for sales in the future. One to three months, depending on the product.
Feedback is an really cool thing, especially when its being manipulated. In this case, we want negative feedback. The trick is to embargo goods briefly, in short periods, at a frequency that interferes with the purchase-ship-sell-next purchase based on sales loop.
I am calling this the 90-Day Punch.
Stop buying a product for 90 days. That is not too hard. Anybody can defer  the pleasure of consumption for a little while.
Then relax for a month or so. Don't stockpile, but enjoy your purchasing. Its important to not buy enough to make up for the last 90 days: one of the advantages here is that this is acting like skipping junk food. Good for wallet and waistline alike!
Not to mention with the money saved, you should be able to easily afford the more expensive goods from local manufacturers and trusted trading partners.
Then do it again!
And again!
Again!

Its just like rocking a canoe: sooner or later the water comes over the side.
Orders drop as retail sales slide in a given quarter. Credit notes come due: factories note the falling sales and scale back production. Perhaps they try to diversify, which absorbs capital and interferes with procedures and schedules. Funds are pumped in to stabilize the situation, but the Cold Hand of Failure claws away the weaker companies.
PRC wage-slaves, already unhappy, edge closer to the boiling point of revolution as jobs are lost and the promise of good things fade.**

The weakness of the PRC economy is its control structure. By grafting capitalist decision-trees onto the fundamental top-down Marxist economy, they have avoided the ponderous shortfalls of the Soviet Union, but they still can't flex fast enough when faced with a grassroots economic modification.
Think about it: if our Governments tried an embargo, they would merely trigger a trade war and be forced to back down. But if we just institute stop-and-go buying, there is an excellent chance that this would work with a very small percentage of the population behind it.
How small? Ten percent? Twenty? Five?

I would have liked to close this by a Mao Zedong quote, but unfortunately, he is best summed up by his remark that reading too many books was harmful.

*Trite argument: if the Soviet Union was defeated by Capitalism, Capitalism stands close to being defeated by Consumerist Marxism.
**Governments never fall when things are good. This should be obvious to anyone in British politics, and a warning to the house-carls of the King in Orange.

"Little things...used to mean so much to Shelley..."

In the category of 'Ideas du Jour ', allow me to suggest a relatively painless way to feel like an environmentalist.
I am calling it the '10% Solution', which encompasses the concept and the praxis in a pithy phrase.

Just do ten percent less.

Eat ten percent less food.

Go out ten percent less.

Buy ten percent less junk.

Drive ten percent slower.

It would have a considerable impact. Lets take the case of driving ten percent slower.
Assuming 10 percent of the North American population take this up, this would mean:
Not burning 3,993,183,000 barrels of oil per year.

Assuming traffic fatalities scale linear with velocity, this would save 350 lives per year.
That is the equivalent of a jetliner crashing!
Its hard to scale actual accidents: a slower moving person has more time to react to a situation, and potentially turn an accident into a near-miss. But even so, it seems reasonable that around 4000 non-lethal accidents would be avoided, but probably more.
Driving slower is considerably less stressful, and driving stress shortens lives as more than one study can attest.
The average commute to work is 25.5 minutes. A Ten-Percenter gets to work in 28 minutes, and can have a happy and productive workday as a happy cog, content in having done their bit to 'Save the Earth'.