Yesterday we went off the beaten path and saw parts of northern Wisconsin for the first time.
Today we crossed the mighty Mac
The first day of our fall 🍁 road trip was fantastic.
I wonder whether religion’s emphasis on belief rather than faith is contributing to the current state of the United States in which believing an outlandish statement, or at least tolerating it, is about showing loyalty. Immigrants eating dogs and cats? I’ll nod my head politely (just like in church when something I am supposed believe but don’t is said), maybe even say, “it’s possible, what do I know?” because it is how I show I am loyal. Stating one’s beliefs or agreeing to a statement of beliefs in the context of religion is a statement of one’s loyalty to that religion.
More fall color is appearing on this tree from when I took this picture of it a week ago.
Finished reading: Falling Upward, Revised and Updated by Richard Rohr 📚 This is third time I’ve read this book, albeit the first time of this edition. It might be the most important book I’ve ever read in how it opens my eyes.
Long time fellow blogger Dave Farquhar frequently writes interesting articles about computing history. I recommend his site, The Silicon Underground.
Android 15 Private Space
I really like this post by John Philipin, and this quote about education and colleges that I wish was my own:
A university is to educate .. not train. If you are wondering about the difference, ask yourself if you prefer your children to attend sex education classes or sex training classes.
My additional two cents is that this is the consequence of a society that defines success as wealth, and wealth as a dollar value. Already back when I was in college in the mid 80s, the majority of my colleagues were there to get the degree to get the “good paying” job. Honestly, that is why I went to college, because the society I lived in, which included my family and peers and nearly all adults defined success as wealth and wealth dependent on a college degree. The point of view may have been framed as enabling the middle class to move up, but in reality it was the destruction of the middle class.
I wonder, how valuable is it really to cross post? I cross post what I write in micro.blog to Mastodon and Bluesky but I don’t really seek nor receive feedback. I suppose what I write is seen more widely but does that really matter? I do have one instance of cross posting that matters to me personally, which is that what I write on my main micro.blog is also posted to my WordPress site that I have posted to for more than a decade. The WordPress site is a larger archive of my writing and also a location of prior experiments of cross posting. At one time what I posted in Twitter and Facebook were cross posted to that WordPress site.
If your eyes don’t see it, but your camera does, is it real? (Context: what is a photo?) My buddy in my home town sent me pictures like this one of the aurora last night saying that can see it without taking a picture.
The problem is not that politicians lie, it’s that there are no consequences for their lies, that is the norm that has been broken.
Ironic Indeed
I’ve been thinking about the contexts within which the United States was founded, specifically Holy Roman Empire and protestantism. The Holy Roman Empire produces the Doctrine of Discovery that authorizes the colonization of the Americas because white Christian men are superior to non-Christian indigenous men. Today the Tipsy Teetotaler shared a quote of Matthew Crawford that says the following about a consequence of protestantism.
But this brings with it a certain anxiety: if I have to stand on my own two feet, epistemically, this provokes me to wonder, how can I be sure that my knowledge really is knowledge? An intransigent stance against the testimony of tradition, and a fundamentally Protestant stance toward religious authority, leads to the problem of skepticism. Tocqueville’s great observation is that the way Americans resolve the anxiety that comes from a lack of settled authority is to look around to see what their contemporaries think. The individualist turns out to be a conformist.
The subhead that the Tipsy Teetotaler wrote for the above quote is, “Individualism, ironically, creates lemmings.” I think these contexts are important in understanding the current state of the United States of America.
The land upon which I as a citizen of the United States now live was stolen because of a belief in the supremacy of one group of people over another, which allows for slavery and the contempt of one human for another. The majority of the people who ultimately settled on that stolen land were raised in a theology that taught scripture alone and scripture apart from anyone other than oneself was authoritative. Consequently we have a pyramid of people who think they are naturally better than others and know more than others, and the “others” are beneath them.
What may be truly ironic, no actually traumatically sad, is that these two forks of Western Christianity claim to follow Jesus, who taught a very different theology of relationship, a view that sees the world as a circle rather than the pyramid of hierarchy. On the other hand, how is this not the result of a religion founded by an emperor? Jesus did not start a religion, he started something more like yeast and weeds.
Today is an American religious holiday, otherwise known as Amazon Prime Day. So powerful is our addiction to consumption, driven by the art (hunt) of the best deal.
First sign of color this fall.
Every team to beat the Brewers has gone on to be in the World Series, so the Mets are going to the World Series! If one is a Brewer fan, do you feel cursed?
The 2024 Detroit Tigers are exhibit A of evidence for how pitching in Major League Baseball is changing from a emphasis on starters to a team pitching staff. The Tigers basically got in to the playoffs with only one legit starter in Tarik Skubal, who dominated the Astros in his first playoff outing yesterday. Today and tomorrow, if necessary, the Tigers will deploy their entire pitching staff with a combination of openers, middle relievers, and closers and they can do so because they have one of the lowest team ERAs. I am sure the Tigers would love to have more than one starter on their staff, and they had that up to the trade deadline, but the quality of the bullpen was good enough to get them a wild card spot, and that would have been the case for the Cubs if the pen were better in 2024.
I am surprised the BleedCubbieBlue.com’s playoff summary of the Mets/Brewers series doesn’t ask the obvious question. Will the Brewers find their problem of not advancing in the playoffs was Craig Counsell? The first year of Counsell’s management of the Cubs produced the literal same result as the prior year, suggesting he is not the difference maker and that David Ross was not the problem. What might it mean about Counsell if the Brewers make it the World Series in the first year after his departure?
I use Readwise Reader to read items that I find on the web. One way it could apply AI/LLMs is to filter what I send to it so that for example I see only sports items or only tech items and then I can just read those items.
I find the essay, Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority, thought provoking. The essay establishes our reliance on trusting “experts” (epistemic authority) in forming our beliefs and how the inherent disinter-mediation of the Internet is disposing of that trust because it infers anyone can be an expert and it enables us to find the experts we want to hear. It raises a question of how we view the First Amendment in light of the Internet. At the root of the problem is belief in a democracy that means anyone can pretty much do whatever they want, with no central authority (central government) in place to put limits on individuals. It seems to me that even after a Civil War the old Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate has never been resolved, and that debate is coming to a head.