Detritus of Empire - 2020

And another year turns over.

Being old and retired I find my sense of time has been subtly altered.  Decades of clinic practice gave me the largely useless super power of being able to always know what time it was within fifteen minutes.  Because of course that was the standard unit of clinic appointments.  Even a decade of ER work did not undo this although it gave me another odd ability.  I was always thinking of how much time I had before Things Fell Apart; as well as how many steps were necessary to prevent said Falling Apart and the sequence and time budgeting for each.   

Three years into retirement now and I have only the residue of these abilities.   

My work with robotics programs probably goes better with that awareness of time management....and the sense of how close we dare push things before Things Fall Apart.   

But lately I'm experincing some other interesting Time Shifts.  Since the FIRST Robotics campaign occupies so much time in January/February/March I basically feel as if winter is over by Kickoff on January 4th.  Snow, subzero cold...just nuisances, mere logistics challenges to be factored in and overcome.  

I also find that I am turning in earlier and getting up at ridiculous hours.  Hey, in retirement you sleep when you are tired and get up when you are not.  I'm almost "preset" to UK time, so I figure our trans-Atlantic ventures in April and May will go off without significant jet lag.

In some areas, such as writing, it is long pauses and short bursts of energy.  I hope in the year ahead to write about robotics a lot, about politics very little.  The grands will get mentioned, but most of the fun with them is out of the public eye.  Brewery caves are getting harder to find, but I have some new lighting and photography tricks to try out and hope for at least a better study of whatever new ones I can locate. 

I'm not big on New Year's Resolutions but perhaps for the year ahead I should set my mind to doing something entirely unexpected.  Stay tuned. 

Oh, and here's an image of something unexpected.  Who knew that in certain southern communities they modified the famous "Ball Drop" in Times Square by slowly dropping a 'Possum!

Sadly PETA put the kibosh on Possum Droppin'

Of Aardvarks and Algorithms

It's hard to feel anything for Facebook.  They are just omnipresent if not always noticed.  Like nitrogen in our atmosphere.  I don't hold them to any particular ethical standards.  As the old saying goes "If you are not paying for a product you ARE the product".  So naturally they sell whatever information they can get about us to all sorts of advertisers.

But of late I'm getting a bit annoyed with them.  The ads I see are a mixture of products for rickety old people (arthritis medicines being among the least offensive) and for witless young people.  So many online games featuring winsome elves.  Just, so many.

It is all run by algorithms, complicated lines of code that suggest that people who click on subject A might well be willing to purchase product B.  Well, time to toss a few wrenches - spanners to my UK friends - into the works.

So, on the first of each month I am going to enter a random string of "interests" into the system.  Maybe by setting ad preferences, maybe by looking up and clicking on various facebook pages.  I will try to make it things that I have little to no real connection with.  And then see how this impacts the ads that FB sends my way.  To make it more fun each batch of "wrenches" will be grouped by alphabet.  Lets start with then things that /cue Grover voice/ start with The Letter A.

Facebook, please, send me ads relating to:

Aardvarks
Albania
Albacore Tuna
Amerigo Vespuchi
AAA batteries
Aye-Aye lemurs
Algebra
AP Calculus
Accordions
Azaleas

I'll report back in a month, and if the experiment proves interesting I've got the rest of the alphabet to play with.

Then I can move on to the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets to really mess with 'em.

Update:

I jumped the gun and threw out aardvark bait a day early.  The first five items I entered as searches on Facebook, the second five on Google.  One of my kids in the tech industry also suggested that I clearly read each line item into the computer's microphone.

So far not much happening, and if I've got the algorithms off balance, great.  Current Facebook ads are something from Paypal wanting to loan me money, exercise equipment which is of course seasonal....and storage shelves.  Hmmmm.  I have been collecting workbenches and shelves for the robotics workshop.  How did they know.

Ah well.  An early toast for the New Year.  "To the Confusion of the Algorithms!"

Christmas 2019

The one day of the year when old dogs get a pass for sleeping on chairs and sofas.

There was the usual Christmas Eve clandestine activity as the younger members of the tribe go next door to the neighbors and construct an elaborate Christmas tableau.  This year the theme was ambitious but the execution so - so.  Warm melty weather is not helpful.

Santa stands on the beach as a twelve foot long "snow shark" pursues assorted elves and gnomes.  "Jaws" as a Christmas movie?

Even the bucket of crimson "elf blood" got washed out an anemic.  Oh well, there's always next year.

And, the freakishly warm weather allowed some front yard construction on Christmas Day.

A brontosaurus - actually according to our four year old expert, a brachiosaurus - stretching its neck seven feet up in the air go grab a few measly leaves off a winter tree branch!

Christmas Bills

It's that time of year again.  My taxidermy pal Bill the Squirrel has an abundance of wardrobe options.  This year he's stylin' a knitted wine bottle cover made to resemble a classic Ugly Sweater.  I suspect the Asian textile mill workers who crank this stuff out pause occasionally to wonder what they'd actually be used for.

I don't think they imagined this:

May your days be Merry and Weird.

The Long Portage

Seen by the side of the road west of Cable, Wisconsin.  There's no wayside rest and really little reason why anyone would stop to investigate.  By this point people have driven a long way and are almost at their lake cabin.

Heck, even I drove straight by for fifteen years before my curiosity got the better of me.  Was that boulder and cement construction method the sign of a CCC project?

Here's a close up of the bronze plaque which needs a bit of cleaning up to be sharp and legible again.

It reads:

NEAR THIS SPOT RAN THE OLD OJIBWAY INDIAN TRAIL BETWEEN CHEQUAMEGON BAY OF LAKE SUPERIOR AND THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.  THIS TABLET IS ERECTED BY THE CABLE TUESDAY CLUB OF CABLE, WISCONSIN 1936

So, this was a portage - a short land bridge between waterways - that could link the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.  Handy if you want to paddle from Duluth to New Orleans.  But who would care about that sort of thing?

Well, trade back and forth between various Native American groups was extensive if mostly done in small amounts of high value items.  A birch bark canoe is not a cargo container ship.  Copper, shells, pipestone and so forth.  Once the Europeans came along things got busier.  Europe wanted furs.  The native peoples wanted metal tools, firearms, and sadly, whiskey.

The portage was used by French traders going back as far as the 1600s.  Jonathan Carver crossed it in 1767.  And an Indian Agent named Henry Schoolcraft, who left us a detailed account of the portage from 1831.  

While looking at various material relating to the portage I found this interesting hand drawn map that is held by the State Historical Society:

As it dates from 1936 I assume it's creator, a certain Robert Hanson, was one of the members of the "Tuesday Club".  And although the detail is not good in this copy it  alludes to markers in the plural, so perhaps there is another one somewhere along the route.  It indicates that they were placed in June of 1936.

As we are dabbling in geocaching these days it seems like a good place to set up a series of points along the portage.  It will be much easier for modern travelers who are not lugging canoes and bundles of beaver furs.

Redneck Winter?

That's the only explanation I can come up with for why the neighbor's garage is sporting a mullet!

Desultory activity by naked men.

Some days are just blah.  Not much exciting going on.  Not much to get excited about frankly.  So one just putters around, going from one task to another without a lot of enthusiasm for any of them.  Just "dialing it in" to use a now dated metaphor.  A slightly older term for this behaviour, listless activity undertaken with indifference, is desultory.  

And it was on just such a Saturday morning a while back that I actually discovered the origins of the word desultory.  It involves naked guys jumping around on galloping horses!

The mosaic pictures below are from the Roman era and depict "desultores".  The term literally means one who "leaps down".  In performances at the Roman circus they would put on quite an acrobatic show leaping on and off running horses.  Sometimes they would have a team of four or six riding abreast and leap from one to another for the amusement of the crowd.

The monochrome mosaics shown above are in the basement of the Palazzo Farnese, a high Renaissance palace that now serves as the French Embassy.  

I'm not certain where this one comes from but at least the horse seems quite a bit less enthusiastic.  He seems to be going about his business in a desultory fashion in our familiar, modern sense of the word!