“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).
For those who remember the “All in the family” sitcom:
Mister, we could use a man like Richard Nixon again
Figure 1: “Richard Nixon” by History In An Hour is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy in the closest (popular) election of the 20th century. There was a credible case to be made that voting irregularities in Chicago (read, the Richard Daley political machine) and Texas put Kennedy over the top (in the electoral college). And yet…
For those who remember the “All in the family” sitcom:
Mister, we could use a man like Richard Nixon again
Figure 1: “Richard Nixon” by History In An Hour is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy in the closest (popular) election of the 20th century. There was a credible case to be made that voting irregularities in Chicago (read, the Richard Daley political machine) and Texas put Kennedy over the top (in the electoral college). And yet…
For those who remember the “All in the family” sitcom:
Mister, we could use a man like Richard Nixon again
Figure 1: “Richard Nixon” by History In An Hour is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy in the closest (popular) election of the 20th century. There was a credible case to be made that voting irregularities in Chicago (read, the Richard Daley political machine) and Texas put Kennedy over the top (in the electoral college). And yet…
And in the to-simple-to-be-true category…
twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/intro.html
$ twtxt tweet "Is there anybody out there, just nod if you can hear me"
1 1 of 2 Goodbye twitter. In 2016 Facebook got too political so I dropped it. Now, Twitter. You can reach me as gmj AT pobox DOT com. Please drop an email if you to stay in touch. I blog semi-regularly at https://eludom.github.io/. 2 2 of 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) is a free, open source, ad-free, distributed twitter-like thing. No corporation algorithmically manipulates your timeline and AUPs are set by the community. I’m on the https://fosstodon.
Source code distribution has changed over the years. Today we all love (hate?) git, github and friends, but, believe it or not there were ways to distribute source code even before the Internet. In fact, this was the world in which the GNU Public License was created. Below are a few of the ways I’ve gotten/transferred source code through the years, in something like chronological order
Figure 1: Code on the Europython 2009 bag" by Thomas Guest is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Post 31 of #100DaysToOffload https://100daystooffload.com/
There is, I think, an urgent need to protect the essence of individuality from headlong technological progress. For unless we are careful, individual men and women may soon be reduced to little more than numbers in immense and terrifying data bank.
Georges Duby, Forward to A History of Private Life, 1987
I’m in the process of deleting Facebook, Twitter and Google from my life. I think Duby et al. were on to something a little ahead of their time.
Figure 1: A History of Private Life
Post 30 of #100DaysToOffload https://100daystooffload.com/
I recently went backpacking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts. One of the reasons I go out is to “get away”, to go “off the grid”, to enjoy nature and get away from adds, trackers, social media, etc.
But a funny thing happened at my last campsite. There was a camera strapped to a tree taking my picture every time I put my food in or out of the “bear box”. The sign on the camera, in addition to asking us not disturb the camera (duct tape, anyone ?) assured us that they were only using the images to track bear activity at the campsite and the images would be destroyed after being used for their intended purpose. Right. They would not be fed to facial recognition software, and the results would not be passed to law enforcement. Right.
Figure 1: “Caméra de vidéo-surveillance” by zigazou76 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
