Today is a newly decreed “inclusion and diversity” holiday at work.
I’ve got the inclusion and diversity cards ready to go. I’ve got the inclusion and diversity lights out of the garage and strung them all over the house (we’re going to out-do the neighbors this year !). We’ve celebrated the annual ritual of baking ethnic foods (cultural appropriation at it’s best, yum !!!). And when the kids are home, we will all gather ‘round the fireplace with hot chocolate and ask
Last Sunday I went to a Christmas concert a a local church. All
flutes (plus the occasional Harp). Who knew there was a
contra-bass flute ?
The concert was a benefit for “Furthest Corners” mission that has
a school and hospital in Myanmar (Burma). I talked to one of
the missionaries who had to leave the country recently due to the
civil war. The civil war in [Burma] has been going on on-and-off for 70 years.
Who knew?
It seems the military decided to bomb the school. It’s half
gone. They are holding school in the other half.
I asked about the war. Apparently its “everybody against the
military and the police now.” Imagine having to go the grocery
store (or grow and store your own rice) in an environment where
you might get mugged by the police. Where do you turn? How do
you live? How do you eat?
I also recently finished All Quiet on the Western Front, a book
about the experience of one German soldier in the trenches of
WWI. The German title of the book Im Westen nichts Neues,
literally translates “Nothing New in the West” referring to the
“news” from the front they day the main character was killed,
with the end of the war in sight and “not much going on”. “Not
much” in who’s view?
“The news” tends to be voyeuristic, detached, high level and mass
market. It tends to feed judgmental views and tribalism.
People are what matter. Kids having a school to go to (or half a
school). Having food to eat. Living free from fear of those who
are supposed to protect you. But that’s not news.
##################### I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day #############################
When I got married I made the decision not to have a TV because I knew
my personal tendency to let it suck up my attention and I did not want
that as an additional distraction from the hard work of building and
maintaining important relationships. My (now 23 year old) son and I
are currently working through the first 3 seasons of Star Trek The
Next Generation (TNG) on DVD.
The real tragedy of COVID is the collateral damage it’s causing to the
way we interact with other people. This is worse than even the deaths
it causes. The damage includes a lack of civility, division in
families, and people dying alone in hospitals because nobody’s allowed
in.
OK, so a year or so later I’m back online with both a self-hosted git and blog presence.
I had been using both github for code and github.io for my blog, but for various reasons I decided to stop putting content there.
Walled gardens go away Walled gardens go way whenever it stops suiting the bottom line of the company. All the form posts from CompuServe (my first employer) are gone AOL Instant Messenger messages (another employer) are gone.
Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon Monday. I met him briefly at an internal company conference (the Amazon Machine Learning conference) when I worked there 2016.
Figure 1: Jeff Bezos I admire him. He’s created things. He built a company that’s changing the world. He had vision. He (and his in-laws) took risks. He provided leadership (see the The Amazon Leadership Principals) and he knew when to get out of the way.
This is my personal history of putting
words-on-page-or-screen-or-blog-entry covering the period from
the late 1970s to present (2020-12-05).
It was written (partially) at the request of JTR from
whom I borrowed a Hugo blog theme. Thanks JTR.
I was writing a post where I wanted to include the \(\TeX\) symbol
in the post, which is perfectly possible in emacs org mode where
\(\TeX\) and \(\LaTeX\) are first class citizens, but it wasn’t
working.
The blog exports to markdown via the ox-hugo Org exporter back
end (lost yet?) which Hugo then translates to HTML which can
then be previewed locally with Hugo’s own web server and then
pushed to the live site, in my case, this site using git push.
I pinged JTR who, it turns out had little experience with
\(\LaTeX\) and so was not able to help. Along the way, he asked
me
Is there more you can tell me about use case for it? In other words,
can I get you to vent some more about this, it’s interesting.
1 Knuth gets annoyed at his publishers, \(\TeX\) is born.
Back in the late 70s Donald Knuth who was (and still is) publishing a
seminal series of Computer Science text books got annoyed at the
typesetting, layouts and font choices he was being presented by
publishers. So he did what any self-respecting hacker who happened
to be Donald Knuth would do: he created his own typesetting system
called \(\TeX\) which (along with \(\LaTeX\) which borrowed heavily from SCRIBE)
is something of a standard to this day in academic publishing.
Because, you know, why is it unreasonable to expect publishers to
render simple equations, right?
“Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention…”
This piece began as some thoughts on “attention” and wound up as reflections on daydreams. I think I’m a fan of daydreaming.
1 Attention Attention is a finite commodity. You only have so much attention to give in your life, in your day. Parents want your attention. Brothers and sisters and friends want your attention. Teachers want your attention. Employers want your attention.
On this Armistice Day, 2020, commemorating the end of “The war to end all wars” 119 years ago, I reflect that if the whole world were busy fiddling with their emacs configs there would be no more war. Well… so the treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations did not work out as planned…so maybe we look for community in the small instead.
There is community that has grown out of research labs in Boston (a city notable for its contribution to the birth of other well known communities).
