Growing Up and Changing One's Mind
My description for what ails the United States is that there is a great deal of immaturity. It does not take much effort to maintain one’s beliefs formed in their teens and twenties, the greater work comes from accepting that not all of one’s beliefs of their 50s should be the same as in their 20s.
Veterans Day
intellectualoid.com https://intellectualoid.com/2026/11/11/veterans-day/
“We have stopped believing in reason’s power to persuade. The right thinks the critical social theories espoused by many on the left are both wrong and pernicious, but it doesn’t expect to be able to convince the left of this view. Hence the move to use raw political or legal power to suppress it. The left, meanwhile, thinks many of those who don’t share its premises are motivated by racism and other forms of bigotry that are in most cases untouchable by argument. Hence the move to use moral condemnation to get resisters excluded from social circles and cultural institutions in which they enjoy various forms of power and status.
These examples are themselves expressions of a broader trend we see all around us in our public life: the tendency to skip the work of attempting to change minds in favor of grabbing the power to control what’s permitted. The clearest, and oldest example, of this move is the appeal to judges to resolve disputes that resist resolution through democratic deliberation and consensus-building. Instead of the right trying (and likely failing) to convince the rest of the country that the New Deal is a bad idea, it seeks to get the Supreme Court to declare the New Deal unconstitutional. Instead of the left trying (and likely failing) to convince the rest of the country that abortion should be legal, it seeks to get the Supreme Court to declare abortion a constitutionally protected right.”
Damon Linker (March 2021) via Alan Jacobs (who adds “I don’t think this is quite right”)
Jacobs says Americans have lost the desire to change minds. I think there also needs to be a culture that has a willingness for our minds to be changed. Ronald Reagan made changing of one’s mind a weakness.
In Which He Discovers Coffee
Dear reader, I have a confession. I am a longtime Keurig user. When I first saw one at a friend’s house I wanted one. You see, I am the only coffee drinker in my house, and so I thought making an entire pot for the two or three cups I drink was a waste. A coffee maker that made one cup at a time was perfect for our house. Over the years I found some pods, such as Peet’s and Angelino’s, had more coffee and made better cups, so I spent a bit extra on those brands.
I’ve been well aware of the downsides of Keurig pods, that they were made of plastic and throwing them out was harmful to the environment. Yes, you can recycle pods, but when convenience is the primary reason why you use them in the first place, the time and effort to recycle didn’t fit. And then there is the growing awareness of the harms of microplastics.
Keurig is no longer the only maker of single-cup brewers, but the ones that provide similar convenience tend to be expensive. Several days ago I read an article about the ecozy Brezzano Switch that has a reasonable price, and when I found I could buy it on Amazon for an additional $40 off, I ordered it.
Today is the 51st anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Let us remember the 29 men who went down with her.
I like how clean Scripting News looks in the markdown version. No tabs along the top, no column of links (blogroll) along the right, just an emphasis on the text. Clean. Easier to read. Loads fast and the reader can select different type faces, so I can select one that makes rendering on a eInk tablet look nice.
Another thing I find interesting is that it looks like the “browser” treats markdown heads as in-page hyperlinks. Mouse over a heading and you see a icon appear to the left, which when you click scrolls the page up to put the head at the top. I think this might be useful for large pages like my Daynotes, I imagine being able to create a table of contents at the top to jump to the months of the year.
I want to give a recommendation for the Walk The Distance app and developer John Zaccone. Like many apps supported by a small team of developers, John has been particularly responsive. Google recently turned off the Fitbit API the app used for receiving data in a switch to Google Health and John made the change over the weekend. I also received notice that I no longer need to pay a yearly subscription unless I use Garmin as an input source.
A critical component of my healthcare is walking several times a day, particularly after meals. The Walk The Distance app provides context for my distance by relating it to a map of popular trails and parks. I first used it to virtually walked the 2,024 mile Appalachian Trail from early 2023 through July, 2024. Right now I am virtually walking the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest trail and have 129 miles to go.
I noticed that the markdown version of my daynotes was not displaying links and upon review of the source I notice that it has HTML tags that are not rendered in Dave’s markdown browser, which he is calling BonBonWeb. I had Claude update the script to convert HTML tags to markdown.
I’ve been meaning to have Claude edit our opml_to_markdown script so that the markdown version of my daynotes is in chronological order rather than reverse chronological order, which I think make more sense when reading it as a document. You can see the result here.
A random dea. What if there were an iPhone Duo emulator for the iPad mini? As I read about the app updates and new apps developed for the Duo UI I recognize that while those apps will run on the Mini it likely won’t run the same as they do on the Duo, which means the Duo inside screen functionality isn’t available although the screen space exists.
I have uploaded a markdown version of my daynotes site to my shared server and you can click here to view that version in Dave’s markdown web browser. One thing I notice is that HTML links are not rendered.