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…
I’ve always liked history. And because the un-examined predilection
is not worth having (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), I turn to Livy to understand it:
This I hold to be the chief value and reward of history, to have
examples of all kinds set forth as an illustrious record, from which
you may choose what is worthy of imitation in public and private life,
and what is to be shunned as wrong in inception and ruinous in outcome
Livy, Preface to History of Rome.
Quoted from “Classics In Translation: Volume II, Latin Literature”,
MacKendrick and Howe, 1982
So, history provides examples for present living. It provides a moral
and practical purpose, helping to guide our interactions with others
in the present, but also…
“Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding miserable and
tragic things which he himself would by no means wish to suffer? Yet
he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow, and this sorrow is his pleasure…”
Was this guy watching too much news, political mudslinging or maybe
just hanging out on Facebook?
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 http://curious.galthub.com/.
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
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.
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.
In this world where Big Internet firms track you to sell you stuff (and to sell YOU), big Government tracks you because, well, they can, and where I found myself on a motion activated camera when backpacking alone in the “backcountry” in an attempt to “get away from it all”, I’ve spend some time thinking about privacy.
Life is short. I could spend a lot of time registering domain names, managing certificates, running my own mail server, de-googling, convincing my friends and family to use nifty new security and privacy apps, and generally fighting the privacy fight as an individual against entire well-funded industries and governments.
1500 miles down, 700 to go to finish section hiking the Appalachian
Trail with 215 miles completed this year in 3 trips.
Of course, I have some of the hardest miles left: the Smokies,
Mt. Washington, the Whites, the Presidentials, the Bigelows, but with
persistence, luck, health, constant gear tweaks (and some HARD hiking)
I should finish in a few years.
