Category: Banalities & Journaling

Caveat: Korean Psephology Revisited From Afar

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I didn’t follow the run-up to last week’s presidential election in South Korea very closely. In fact I lost track of it happening, and it took a local acquaintance more tuned in to world events than I to point out to me that it had happened last Wednesday.

But looking at and thinking about the results, I’m mostly unsurprised. I remain, as always, intrigued by the electoral map, though.

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The ancient province of Jeolla stands out as starkly and quite isolatedly leftist – more so than previous maps I’ve looked at, it seems to me.

Meanwhile, suburban Seoul seems more consistently left-leaning, too. But the rest of the country swung even more rightward, more than compensating for these leftward trends in those limited areas, and ensuring a victory for the conservative, Mr Yoon.

I would almost hazard to say the map looks like evidence of increasing polarization. Which is to say, perhaps an Americanization of Korean politics? I don’t know.

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Caveat: Україна

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

So, these days, what’s on my mind? Obviously, the war in Ukraine. A half-formed thought.

It’s an important question, but difficult to ask: how is what’s happening right now in Ukraine qualitatively different from what happened in Iraq about 20 years ago? Except for the minor difference that we (Americans) are on the other side? I don’t raise this question because I am trying to defend Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but rather to make sure you can empathize with some of the never-resolved discomfort I felt about that other war. There are other differences. The US-led coalition was “bigger” or broader. The US military seemed at least somewhat more competent – perhaps at some things. But not more competent at all things: more competent killing people? Yeah, maybe; more competent not getting killed? Yeah, definitely; more competent at getting praised and welcomed with open arms by the liberated populace? Uh… not really. But mostly these are quantitative differences, not differences in the moral foundations of the enterprise.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: на хуй

Banalities & Journaling / Geofiction / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

At the geopolitical level, I think Putin and the Russian military have miscalculated.

Despite this (or preliminary to this), I should go on record that I actually agree with their “logic” on one key point: Ukraine, historically, is a part of Russia (or, depending on the point in history and the particular patch of land, Poland). Which is to say, Russian revanchist fantasies have some foundation in historical fact. The separate Ukrainian SSR was only carved off of Russia by Lenin in the 1920’s, and the Ukrainian national identity was essentially an artifice wrought by the half-hearted multiculturalist tendencies of the Soviet experiment. As Lenin said (hypocrisy alert), “The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that ‘its own’ nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible.”

This Russian mistake, however, will be their undoing. If Ukraine lacked a “founding myth” and identity before now, Russia’s invasion is giving them one. From now on and far into the future, this Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the kind of foundational myth for Ukrainians that they never had before – and that will happen regardless of whether they win or lose the current war. If they win, then it will be a myth on the same level as George Washington and the American Revolution. If they lose, they become guerilla partisans like the Palestinians on the West Bank, and forge a distinct Ukrainian identity on that basis.

There is no scenario under which Ukraine fails to become a truly distinct nation in the geopolitical sense, as a direct consequence of Russia’s actions. And personally, I think that’s something that had been in doubt, until now. Putin’s “real-world geofiction” is not going to alter the map in the way that he hopes.

Here is the Ukrainian Highway Signs Agency, contributing to the information war:

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The sign has been altered to say, loosely, “Fuck Off / Fuck Off More / Fuck Off Back to Russia”.

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Caveat: Tree #1124

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

This tree was along a long and winding road.
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I left the Gift Shop early, today, because we had an appointment with an electrician out here at the house.

This was perhaps (hopefully) the concluding chapter in our saga of the weird brown outs. After looking over our system, and trying some things out, and despite our being able to reproduce the described problem, the electrician decided that we had a corroded main breaker (in the box on the utility pole). I found this plausible, as when he flipped the breaker switch one time, it made ominous buzzing noises, and he said he saw it arcing. Which was kind of scary – the electrician jumped back in alarm at that.

So he installed a new breaker. We’re running the heat pump, no problem, the rest of the afternoon and evening. Meanwhile I set out with the chainsaw to replenish our much-reduced firewood supply – since we’ve been heating the house more with the wood stove these past weeks (due to the heat pump not running).

Here is a picture of the old, corroded main breaker that the electrician removed.
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picture[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 3hr; chainsawing, 1hr]

Caveat: Sunbeam #1

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

Living on the south side of the inlet means we live on the north side of a mountain. And in the winter, at this latitude, that means direct sunlight doesn’t reach us for about 3 1/2 months each year, as the sun is too low in the south to reach over the top of the mountain – we are in its shadow all day.

So I have always meant to try to record the days when the sun reaches over the mountain for the first time, in spring (and likewise, when it disappears in the fall). The problem is that we also live in a very, very overcast part of the world. So we never know quite what day it is. But it’s close to today: today, we had quite chilly but clear weather, for a change of pace.

So the sun peeked between two trees on the mountain’s ridge, and struck through my south-facing window next to my desk. For about 5 minutes.

“Oh,” I said to myself. “A sunbeam. What’s this?” I took a picture.

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Meanwhile, we are still waiting to hear back from the electricians about having them come visit to diagnose our weird electrical problem (I think I blogged this before, but if not, the TLDR is: we experience “brown outs” when we pull high levels of current, e.g. the heating system).

I checked in with them this morning, but they are quite busy, as is to be expected, being the only licensed electrical contractors based on the island, as far as I’ve been able to figure out. “Maybe later this week,” the woman reassured me, quite pleasant but clearly clueless as to what their actual schedule might be. Island Time.

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Caveat: Documentation of layers

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Geofiction

I have been trying to develop some user-friendly documentation for the map layers on the main opengeofiction.net website (where I am server host and technical administrator). I have written quite a bit over the last 24 hours, and posted it to two articles on the OpenGeofiction wiki.

For those who might think I’m just a layabout and don’t do much, here is evidence to the contrary.
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Caveat: Tree #1119

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree is not out of the woods yet.
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I spent quite a bit of the day waiting around in town, because Art had multiple medical appointments in town. He had PT in the morning at 9 at the SEARHC clinic in Craig, and a dental appointment at the SEARHC clinic in Klawock at 1. In the interim, I put in an hour at work while Art hung out at the Veterans Center – open only on Thursdays, run by the infamous Jan, who is also my coworker. Small town life, right?
picture[daily log: walking, 2km; waiting, 4hr]

Caveat: epistemectomy

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Language & Linguistics / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I just made up this word: epistemectomy – a procedure which removes knowledge from a person or information system.

I read strange things on the internet almost every day.

Earlier today, while Arthur was at the dentist, I found and began reading a web story (or, maybe, novella), on my phone. It’s about an object that functions as an “antimeme”. An “antimeme” is an idea (perhaps embedded in an object) that in its nature prevents people from being interested in it or remembering it. This opposes to the normal definition of “meme” – which is an idea that encourages people’s interest and recollection.

So unfortunately I can’t remember much about the story (okay, maybe that’s a joke).

Anyway, I recommend you can try to read it. It’s quite weird, though – just a warning. In fact, though, the story recalls certain features of certain secret societies that play difficult-to-define roles in some of my unfinished novels.

Here is the beginning of the story: We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five (part of the Antimemetics Division series).
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Caveat: Tree #1119

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree is from my past. It is in front of a big cliff. There is a little hermitage structure at the top of the cliff, called 연주대 [yeonjudae], on Gwanak mountain, South Korea.
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In other news, today is Elizabeth Peratrovich Day. How did you celebrate Elizabeth Peratrovich day? I celebrated by selling 14 balloons at the Gift Shop.
picture[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]

Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #13

Banalities & Journaling / My Drawings & Paintings / Working at the Gift Shop

I last posted one of these “Frame shop journal” entries about 3 months ago.

Certainly it’s not the case that I haven’t been making frames. Perhaps I got so busy that I simply stopped consistently recording my work. The month of December probably saw me assembling on the order of 50-75 frames – I don’t know the exact number. This was the Christmas rush, combined with the community panic over the possibility that the Gift Shop (and therefore the framing and matting shop it includes) would be shutting down permanently.

But then with January 1st rolling around, the Gift Shop was rescued by new owners, Chad and Kristin. They are slowly implementing lots of changes to the business, but fully intend to retain the matting and framing aspect, and thus, for now, I continue with job security in my relatively low-stress, very part-time position.

As I said, I’ve stopped recording every single frame I’ve done. But setting aside the Christmas insanity, here are a bunch of shots of recent work, from January and the first half of February. In no particular order and with minimal commentary.

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This last framing is much more significant to me personally than any other I’ve done. Can anyone guess why?
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Maybe if I start posting more regularly, I’ll manage to include more examples of my work.

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Caveat: a storied storage tent meets its end

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

I finished my fraught disassembly of my storage tent today. The morning was actually slightly sunny and nice, but by 1 PM it was quite windy and starting to rain.

I got the storage tent canvas parts spread out and weighted by rocks, and draped a simple 20′ x 40′ tarp over the “stuff” that had been inside the storage tent. This includes firewood, recyclables (because recycling isn’t currently done on the island, but I daydream it might one day be done again, as it used to be), some construction materials (boards and plywood and plastic pipe), some unused collapsed boxes and other various containers.

With the wind whipping into a frenzy, I threw a bunch of rocks and stuff on top of the tarp and hoped for the best.

The storage tent has consumed a lot of my labor over the past 3 years. I think it will be retired, now – too many of its structural pieces are bent or broken by the giant load of snow in December.

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Caveat: Tree #1113

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree saw something quite unexpected: a ray (just one ray during the whole day) of sunshine.
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Arthur has traveled, on his own, to Anchorage because he needs technical help with his hearing aids and of course no one in Southeast Alaska can do that – so the VA is sending him to Anchorage, at their expense, to try to solve the problem. Some people have expressed concern about Arthur traveling alone. I suppose I share that concern, but I just hope for the best and think he’ll muddle through. Strangers are mostly helpful and kind, and all of Alaska is basically just a small town that happens to take up a lot of land, such that the “city bus” is run by an airline.

I got a phone call from Arthur to confirm his arrival in Anchorage. Apparently Arthur got off the plane at Juneau, thinking he’d arrived in Anchorage. He got as far as the baggage carousels before realizing he was in the wrong airport. Fortunately the plane (which takes off and lands multiple times in its island-hopping journey from Seattle to Anchorage, and has the atmosphere of an intercity bus) waited for him to realize his error and so he was able to reboard.
picture[daily log: walking, 1.5km; dropping Arthur at airport, 2hr]

Caveat: really very old random photos

Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

I’ve been doing some “spring cleaning” of a sort, up in my attic abode. I ran across some quite old photos that were not stored with my other old photos, and therefore had missed out on early efforts to scan and digitize. So I scanned and digitized these pictures. In chronological order:

From 1979, this is my 8th grade class picture. This was a formative year for me in some respects – it was the year I decided to become a nerd. This was, in fact, a more-or-less conscious choice from among the various social cliques and groups I saw to choose from in the middle-school milieu of the era. I’m still recovering from that ill-fated decision, 40 years on.
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From 1983, this is me with my brother Andrew. I was a senior in HS – the slight tan seems to indicate late spring or summer. Andrew was… well, quite small.
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From 1992 or 93, Michelle (my wife from 1994-2000 when she passed away). I remember this dress.
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Caveat: Dogwalking #28 and robot dogs that walk

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Life in Alaska / My Photos / Science & SciFi

I continue the dogwalking habit. She has good days and bad days in terms of behavior. This morning was a very bad day – somewhat stressful. I generally let her off her leash for a while, when near our house. Mostly she runs around in circles and explores but always within earshot. This morning, though, she went chasing some waterfowl down the beach and completely disappeared.

I wandered and called her name for 30 minutes, then went back to our house, reported the situation to Arthur, called Mike and Penny to let them know their dog had disappeared, and went off along the road calling the dog’s name and hoping she’d hear me and come to me.

Meanwhile, she showed up at our house right after I’d left again – so Arthur, knowing the dog was “lost,” let her in. But instead of keeping her at our house until I came back, he decided to deliver the dog to Mike and Penny’s. So off they went, though I think honestly the dog would have found her way home without Art’s escort. Of course Art didn’t think to contact me that he’d found the dog. So I’m walking along the beach and the road eastbound, calling for the dog and stressing out. Art is walking west, with the dog, without a care in the world, and he and the dog arrive at Mike and Penny’s and Mike gets the dog back on the leash.

I guess I would have preferred to know what was going on, as I spent another 30 minutes walking up and down the road, calling the dog’s name. But eventually Penny came driving along and found me, to let me know the dog was found.

Here is a picture of the dogless beach.
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Meanwhile, I have been watching these videos about a guy building an open-source dog robot. He provides an immense amount of detail. It’s all very interesting. In the specific video below, the 7th in the series, he is refining the dog’s walking style.

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Caveat: Increasingly vague turtles, farther down

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

I read weird things online, almost every day.

Today, I read an article by Physics and Computer Science blogger, Scott Aaronson, in which he asks: Why is the universe quantum-mechanical?

He requests answers from the public. I wouldn’t dare to presume to participate – I lack knowledge. Nevertheless, I found myself rather quickly forming a thoroughly amateur opinion about it.

My own hypothesis:

If the universe is in fact finite (by definition presumably), its quantum nature simply makes sense. It’s a kind of requirement. A universe governed by classical mechanics suffers a problem of essentially infinite potential precision – what level of precision is necessary to produce all the universe as it is? It’s unbounded, and regresses to infinity at ever-smaller scales. But in a quantum-mechanical universe, there is an upper bound on the amount of information required to “run” it (to run the universe, that is). That’s because only examined values need to be precise – otherwise there are just fuzzy probabilities.

There’s the old joke about the scientist who asks some traditionalist guru about their supposed notion that the world is on the back of a giant turtle. The guru insists, preemptively: “Don’t even ask. It’s turtles all the way down.”

Instead of “turtles all the way down” it’s more like “turtles receding into the distance, until they are only specks, and which when examined through a lens, are really only just specks, or rather, they look like turtles to the best of our ability to resolve the image, but that ability suffers constraints due to the quality of the lens.” The turtles farther down are less precise, until, at some very distant point, they are only notional turtles at best. Consequently, though the “number” of turtles is definitionally infinite, the amount of memory required to store all the turtles is finite, because each one is less precise than the one above it.

I think the universe being quantum-mechanical in nature solves a similar problem that arises in classical mechanics.

Out of 500+ comments, Scott Aaronson succeeds in rebutting my amateur answer somewhere around comment #5:

Responding to comment #2 (which in some broad respects resembles mine), he writes, “Any answer along those lines, it seems to me, immediately crashes and burns once we realize that passing to wavefunctions, far from decreasing our classical simulation cost, has exponentially increased it—the fact famously exploited by quantum computation.”

I’m not sure it completely makes sense. It depends on whether you assume that all the collapsing wave functions must necessarily be collapsing. Isn’t there something in QM that says that the wave functions only collapse when someone looks? Isn’t most of the universe not being looked at, most of the time? Schrödinger’s litter box, and all that…
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Caveat: LINGVA LATINA vs 한국말

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

So I was surfing the internet to random linguistics things – as one does – when I ran across this youtube video of a guy giving a passionate speech in seemingly entirely spontaneous Latin. He’s not what you would call a first-langage native speaker of Latin, obviously (there’s no such beast), but he’s definitely what one would classify as a fully fluent second language speaker of it. His Latin is “accented” by his first language (Italian) – but anyway, most fluent Latin speakers speak what is called “church Latin” which is essentially what we might think of as “Latin with an Italian accent”.

I suppose this intrigued me because I studied Latin while in high school, and subsequently was in essence a student of Romance Philology at the University of Pennsylvania, in my graduate program in Spanish Literature and Linguistics. I was required to take Spanish philology, which included being able to negotiate texts in late Iberian Latin and Old Spanish, as well as familiarize myself with other languages that influenced the Spanish Language’s evolution: Arabic, Gothic, “Celtiberian”, Basque, etc. I also had to take a “reading exam” in French (quite hard for me – my high school French was originally poor and rusty too) and Portuguese (less hard – I’d studied Portuguese some).

The epiphany that struck me as I watched this man speechifying in Latin was that in fact, I understood him better than I would a similar speech in Korean. The combination of my fluency in Spanish, my familiarity with other Romance languages like French, Portuguese and Italian, and my original fairly strong Latin from high school served well enough to make a lot of sense out of what the man was saying. I couldn’t necessarily give a summary of his ideas, but I could at least gather topic to some extent, and catch lots of individual concepts. My Korean comprehension isn’t quite that good – even though I lived in Korea for more than a decade and several times dedicated myself to formal instruction in Korean (maybe a cumulative of 2 years worth of college-level Korean).

This is of course a bit depressing, given my publicly visible “revised bucket list“. I haven’t been doing much Korean study, these days.
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Caveat: a storehouse of decrepitude

Banalities & Journaling

I began disassembling my defunct storage tent today – despite the chilly, drizzly weather. I was fed up and frustrated with efforts to better understand some issues with my map server, so I thought I’d better use my time on something more on the manual-labor end of the scale.

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Caveat: Dogwalking #18 and a handy problem-solving algorithm

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Life in Alaska / My Photos / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

I took the dog on a walk this morning – first in a week, as the road has been so icy and slippery I haven’t felt inspired to attempt it. The dog was pleased to take a long walk, and was on best behavior. I suspect that’s just coincidence – I don’t think she really thinks things through at that level, being a fairly impulsive beast.

Here are some pictures of the dog – walking.

She pulled hard on her leash till I let her off it.
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She found a deer-carcass skeleton – but she didn’t get carried away with it, as dogs sometimes do with disgusting dead things.
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She stood still for a brief moment for the camera. Not usual.
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Meanwhile, here is a handy way to solve hard problems, as attributed to the famous physicist, Richard Feynman.

The Feynman Algorithm. “The steps are as follows: Write down the problem. Think real hard. Write down the solution. Easy!”

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Caveat: I will pray for your lucky

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / Working at the Gift Shop

My coworker Jan, at the gift shop, likes to order various exotic herbal medicines and supplements, often from Asia. She ordered something from Korea not that long ago – I don’t know what it was (some kind of mushroom extract?). But when she got her product delivered, it included this note from the vendor.

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To Buyer,

Thank you so much for your purchase!!!!!
I hope you had a pleasant transaction as much as I enjoyed:-)
You are such a beautiful, gorgeous, perfect, incredible, fabulous,
fantastic, the one-of-a-kind, mind-boggling, and Excellent buyer!!!
Even though we are oceans apart, I feel it's my honour to have a
chance to get to know you through Amazon.com. That's why I love
having transactions on Amazon.com
I will try to meet your needs by providing better service and
products.

I will pray for your lucky,if you leave a good feedback on Amazon.com.
I wish that you are in good health and fortune with your family.
Hope to deal with you again. Thank you.
Have a wonderful day!!! Have a great day!!!!

Many thanks and Kind regards,
Kevin Kim

This made me nostalgic for my Korean students’ inimitable English style. This could have been written by one of them, easily. So much hyperbole!!!! So many exclamation points!!!!!!!!!

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Caveat: Tree #1089

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree (a tree frequently featured here) oversaw a road-to-town still coated in ice.
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I drove to town anyway. It was remarkable – it was like driving from Minnesota to California in under an hour. There’s NO snow on the ground, in town, just brown grass and it was a sunny day. Craig, out on a point of land, is just a little bit warmer, but, more notably, it gets more rain and less snow than at our house – just enough that while we still have a foot of snow on the ground, downtown Craig is snow-free right now.

picture[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 5hr]

Caveat: Tree #1086

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree is my coast redwood tree that nearly died outside during the super cold spell we had at the beginning of December. Then I tortured it by making it serve duty as our Charlie Brown Christmas tree. But since then its spirits seem to have improved. It’s put out some little light green young needles on the ends of its branches. I put it out on the balcony to enjoy the rain and wind today.
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picture[daily log: walking, 2km; cistern-filling, ~1500gallons]

Caveat: Après moi, le déluge

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

The rain came. Two inches so far today, in our rain-counter. And it’s not dark yet.

But on top of 6-inch-thick layers of ice on the roads, and 2-3 feet of snow piled on everything, it’s not enough, even there, to clear anything. It just creates lakes on the road, on top of the ice, and it turns my carefully-hewn network of snow-shoveled paths into slush-swamps, ankle-deep and devoid of friction.

My network of paths also created a bit of a problem: they channeled the rain and melting snow down our stairs toward the house, which would, of course, make a mess under the house under the upper front door. So I built a “dam” of ice and snow across the stairs and dug a channel off to the side to divert the waters.

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For future reference, I should try to make sure to dig out “drains” when putting in snow-paths.

Good thing I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.

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Caveat: Dogwalking #17 and a thought on solitude

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos / Quotable

I walked the dog yesterday after a long break from dogwalking due to excessively icy roads and my own under-the-weatherness over the New Years weekend – mostly it was burnout from the hard push of extra hours working at the gift shop up to and through Christmas. She behaved quite well yesterday.

Today I walked the dog again, but she was quite badly behaved. She decided to chase a car, and pursued it at least as far as the shooting range – about a mile from our house. I had to walk to catch up to her, in very cold weather and calling for the dog. Then when I found her, I had to convince her to come close to me so I could catch her and put her leash back on. That was time consuming and difficult.

Then we made the trek back to her house, on the leash rather than letting her run free.

She seems to realize the leash is a problem, and frequently pauses and engages the leash in a game of tug-of-war to show her feelings.

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It was a longer walk than usual, anyway. Probably good for me.

I had a thought about solitude. Actually, the following quote is my own modification of something I must have run across somewhere online, which I have been unable to track down.

I like being alone. I have full control over my own life and my imagination has free rein. Therefore, in order to win me over, your presence has to feel better than my solitude. You’re not competing with another person, you are competing with my own mental landscape.

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Caveat: 100 years in the future

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / Found Online / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Science & SciFi

I read weird things online, almost every day.

Today, I read an article published in 1922, predicting the future! It told me all about what life would like in 2022. So now I know! The article is here.

Like all efforts at futurism, it had its hits and misses. I like the use of the term “kinephone” – by which the author means something like television. No inkling of the universal information and communication device in each of our pockets, now. On the other hand, this sentence is quite perceptive and interesting (bearing mind the context – in 1922, the women’s vote was 3 years old, and very fresh in people’s minds):

…[I]t is unlikely that women will have achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery.

In other news, I went to see the doctor today. For the first time since moving back to the United States in the summer of 2018, I had a doctor’s appointment of my own (as opposed to being a drag-along for Arthur’s doctors’ appointments). It was a general health checkup, not related to any specific ailment or concern. I had been told by my diagnostic oncologist, Dr Cho, in 2018, that “maybe after about 3 years” I should see a doctor as a follow-up to the cancer surgery. It’s been 3 1/2 years, but I just decided I should at least be “on record” at the local healthcare provider, and see what the doctor had to say after a short prodding / checking, along with review of relevant medical history (such as I could report – obviously he doesn’t have access to the Korean National Cancer Centers records).

The doctor took a look in my mouth, prodded my neck, asked some questions, and together we opted against a CAT scan (which I was hoping to opt against, given the hassle and cost). He seemed to agree with Dr Cho’s reported assessment from 2018: any cancer at this point will be a “new” one, as opposed to a follow-on to (metastasis of) the previous one.

So we’ll continue to assert, as I have been, that I am cancer-free, with the caveat (really, a caveat?) that biologically, none of us are truly cancer-free.
picture[daily log: walking, 3km; dogwalking, 3.5km]

Caveat: 404

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Life in Alaska

The code “404” is the message a webserver gives to a client (to your browser) when a resource (a specific webpage or URL) is “not found.” It’s a kind of error code.

Most web 404’s are pretty boring. This here blog thingy has the standard apache 404: here – it doesn’t even bother saying the number “404”, which actually bothers me a little bit but not enough to go try to fix it.

Some websites use their 404 page to post jokes of various kinds, or to say something vaguely amusing. Google’s 404: “That’s an error…. That’s all we know.”

One of my favorite 404’s is the Financial Times (of London) newspaper website: here. [UPDATE 2024-01-05: It seems this 404 page at the Financial Times is no longer amusing. It’s become quite boring.]

In other news, I had a dead battery this morning. An annoying circumstance, but I survived – it didn’t happen at the house, but rather after I’d gone to town and parked at a merchant while running an errand this morning. The car said, “404 – battery not found.”

We’ll see how it does tomorrow morning. The NAPA store here in town didn’t have the needed battery model in stock (of course if didn’t). So I’m carrying around one of those nifty battery-pack jump starter thingos, now.

picture[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 6hr]

Caveat: never gonna be easy

Banalities & Journaling / Science & SciFi

The whole vaccination thing… is quite dispiriting. The unexpectedly high number of people I interact with who are vaccine-reluctant seems like a summary of our current cultural atmosphere of distrust in institutions and distrust in science. And yet that distrust also often seems legitimate and justified. We are evolving from what sociologists call a “high trust society” to a “low trust society.” Typically, the low trust societies, with their opaque social norms, struggle to advance, and often result in so-called “failed states.”

My own perspective is: trust, whether in individuals and personal relationships, or in society more broadly, often requires a leap of faith. One must simply decide to trust in something because it’s the right thing to do. I guess that’s my approach. Your views may differ.

I read weird things online, almost every day.

Today, I read an article about a new, more low-tech approach to developing another COVID vaccine. It can be found here. The main point seems to be – a lot of money and effort was expended with all the high-tech vaccines, but ultimately this drove up the price and lowered the worldwide rate of vaccination, especially in lower-income countries (where most humans are). Taking a more low-tech approach could have saved many lives, and could have advanced the cause of achieving herd immunity. That’s fine, but as a counterpoint, it still seems to me that the “rate of confirmed deaths” points to institutional failures, and not a failure of vaccination regimes, specifically. This is the graph I check most often, here. Why are equally-wealthy and developed countries like the US and South Korea so different? And, yet, wait… perhaps now they are converging?
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Caveat: 3 jobs

Banalities & Journaling

When people ask me what I “do” – meaning what my work is – I don’t really feel comfortable just saying I’m working doing matting and framing, 2-3 days a week, in the gift shop. It’s unimpressive. It makes me feel like I’m a layabout, a slacker.

So I tell them I have 3 part-time jobs. It’s just that two of them are essentially “unpaid.” This sounds more like I keep busy. Which I think is actually accurate. Besides my matting and framing job at the gift shop, my other two jobs are: a part time helper / carer for my uncle (to the extent he tolerates that), and a part time systems administrator and designer for a group of hobbyist websites. Somewhat obliquely, I’ve written exactly this thinking before, on this blog.

Today I wanted to write about a sort of 3-way categorization / classification I came up with for my 3 jobs. I rate each job on the dimensions of:

  • time – what kind of demands it makes on my time
  • challenge – what kind of demands it makes on my ability and talent
  • emotions – what kind of emotional demands it makes

Here it is.

My first job – caregiver to a reluctant caregetter:

  • easy in terms of time – it probably adds up to less the 10 hours a week, the stuff I do to help him specifically
  • easy in terms of challenge – the work isn’t hard; sometimes repetitive or frustrating, but generally not difficult
  • stressful in terms of emotions – it’s emotionally quite difficult to work with someone who more often than not resents my efforts to help and frequently denies needing help

My second job – the gift-shop matting and framing clerk:

  • easy in terms of time – I only work at most 20 hours / week, often less
  • stressful in terms of challenge – the job isn’t actually challenging, but… well, the commute is
  • easy in terms of emotions – there’s not much emotional energy required (aside from stress)

My third job – world’s least-paid linux systems analyst and website designer:

  • stressful in terms of time – the server often has a very demanding schedule, and it can take a lot of time to get things working right; I probably invest 40 hours per week
  • easy in terms of challenge – the job actually is challenging, but in a way that I enjoy, so I think it doesn’t count
  • easy in terms of emotions – there’s not much emotional energy required (aside from stress)

So I guess there’s no reason I’m writing this, except I like to analyze and classify things.
picture[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]

Caveat: Might just be a SQL hack

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Found Online / Science & SciFi

I read weird things online, almost every day.

Today, I read an article about using a commercial relational database to process large (very large) linear algebra problems. These type of linear algebra problems, often with 1000’s of dimensions (rows x columns) in matrices, are typically found in running neuron-net simulations such as are used in contemporary machine-learning algorithms (the type of of tools behind the magic of e.g. google translate).

The article can be found here. I suppose the reason I read it at all is because I used to work with relational databases, and I have a vague but slightly comprehensible memory of the principles of linear algebra, it being one the few advanced math topics I actually mastered before my college math-major career crashed and burned in 1984. I don’t claim any deep understanding, but I liked the idea of hacking a relational database to do this other type of work – it definitely feels like a kind of “hack” – but a useful one that could end up making large neural-net algorithms more manageable, which opens the way for new, more complex machine-learning applications. Useful hacks often become state-of-the-art for the following generation of programmers, and get grandfathered into important processes, languages and applications. The whole thing just sort of hovers there on edge of understanding, which seems to be where I generally situate my technical reading, these days.

Meanwhile, I saw no notable tree today.

picture[daily log: ice-walking, 2km]

Caveat: 김치볶음밥 알라스카 스타일

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink

Normally, on Thursdays Art and I go to town and do our weekly shopping and library visit, but because of how icy the road was, I decided not to. We also normally order a pre-made pizza at the place called “Papa’s Pizza” and take it home and so Thursday is “pizza night.” Yesterday, we had no pizza night. I got a bit creative, and made kimchi bokkeumbap (Korean style fried rice) – something I’ve been craving.

I’d tried the dish once before, a few years ago, for Arthur, to rather mixed reviews. So I altered the recipe some to his benefit: I doubled the amount of ham I used, I halved the amount of kimchi I added (compensating with some red pepper powder to keep it spicy), and I was generous with salt. I left out the dried seaweed garnish that is integral to the Korean version.

Arthur declared this new version entirely acceptable. Which is high praise, coming from Arthur. And I put my seaweed on the side and added it separately to my own serving. To be honest, I found the result to be remarkably close to my memories of the street-vendor version available on every corner in South Korea. It was very good.
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Caveat: Dogwalking #12 and the collapse of civilization (again)

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

I went out this morning to discover that my storage tent (sometimes called the “studio”) had collapsed under the load of ice and snow. I suspect it got bombed by chunks of ice or snow falling off nearby trees, which didn’t help.
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This is not the first time my storage tent has suffered the inclemencies of the weather. Last year it got blown down off its foundations and ended up caught up in a tree – which was impressive for a structure that is 20 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 8 feet tall.

Anyway, I am dismayed, but not overly so. It has provided approximately the value I paid for it, which wasn’t really that much – a couple hundred dollars. I think in the spring I will build some other type of structure, which might weather the weather better, so to speak.

Meanwhile, I went and took the neighbor dog for a walk.
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