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It’s probably the last t-shirt day outside for the year.
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Looks like OSIRIS-REX successfully collected a sample from Bennu yesterday.
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Andrew Shell and Dave Winer write about rethinking blogs and streams. I wrote about this a couple of years ago when I discovered Federated Wiki, and I still think blogs are well suited to writing associated to dates whereas wikis are well suited for writing associated to topics. My wiki is a garden that I tend whereas my blog is a stream that I add to and review occasionally.
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OSIRIS-REX tagged Bennu, which I assume is now IT. Hopefully Bennu doesn’t tag Earth back.
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Watching the broadcast on NASA.TV as a robotic space craft is in process of descending to the surface of an asteroid to gather a sample. It’s a 15 second touch and go occuring on the other side the solar system.
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I am tired of receiving spam text messages for the election. The Google Messaging app recognizes them as potential spam and provides me an option to report it as such and block, but I feel like that is just a game of whack-a-mole.
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My current work desk setup with the Lenovo Duet and Roam open, ready to take notes. Roam pairs well with ChromeOS.
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Love the symmetry of this tree.
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It’s the 35th anniversary of Amy Grant’s Unguarded album. I remember playing that cassette over and over during my college years. Oh how the years go by.
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Accepting Deaths
COVID-19 is the third highest cause of death in the United States from February to October of 2020. One of the problems we have is how people are viewing these deaths. Rather than viewing them as an “event” caused death, like 9/11, people are viewing as a disease caused death, like heart disease, cancer, and strokes. In this case they are thinking, hundreds of thousands of people die from disease every year and this is the same.
The reason why this matters is that some people who view these deaths as similar to other diseases are more willing to view the 200K+ deaths as acceptable, but what they are not taking in to account is that all of the other diseases on the list have known preventative measures, treatments, and expected impacts, whereas we have none of these for COVID-19. The number of deaths of the other diseases would be higher each year if not for the years and years worth of science to lower the risk.
Further, neither heart disease or cancer, which are the two higher causes of death so far this year, are something in which a health person contracts the disease and can die in a matter of days or even weeks.
The point is that we should all be angry about the number of people who have died from COVID-19, particularly if we claim to place a high value on life. Surely, like all other places around the world, some people would have died no matter what, but nobody should view 200K+ deaths as acceptable and the problem is there is not true end in sight because there is zero leadership in the United States toward anything that resembles a plan.
The closest to what appears to be the plan is to just let the disease run its course. Perhaps another 100+ or more people will die, and too many people are ok with that so long as they can go wherever and do whatever they want to do. Meanwhile other nations in the world took active measures and controlled the very same disease we seem unwilling to fight, and did so for the sake of everyone in their country!
For people who want to put country over seemingly anything else, I don’t know how they can be proud of how we, the United States, is handling this crisis.
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My current status page is at frankm.info that I maintain in Little Outliner. I’ve also created an index of the technology that I use that you can access via [tech.frankm.info](tech.frankm.info0..
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Google Fit is an obvious candidate for Assistant shortcuts. I use the Goodnight routine and I want it to automatically record when I go to bed. At the least I should be able to tell Assistant that I went to bed at X and woke up at Y.
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United States Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
Conservaties believe that the natural rights enumerated above are paramount to any and all laws, orders, and rulings of the U.S. government. The pandemic raises the question though of whether the right to liberty, which appears to be translated by most as meaning the right to do anything they want, stands above the right to life.
Ironic isn’t it, that as we begin to witness another series of SCOTUS confirmation hearings, we are witnessing this very debate in which Republicans insist that the right to life is paramount over the liberty of a woman to choose what to do with her body. No matter then the hypocrisy of these same Republicans insisting their right to liberty is paramount over everyone else’s right to life. Well, if you seek the common denominator you might find there really isn’t any hypocricy.
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Here We Go Again Michigan
It seems logical to me that the number of cases of COVID-19 will increase as the weather gets colder in the northern United States causing people to spend more time indoors without good ventilation. A report over the weekend appears to provide the statistical evidence, the R0, or rate of infection, has jumped to 1.12, you want it to be below 1. Daily new cases per 100,000 people is 11.7, a number above 10 is considered high. The good news is that ICU occupancy is low so for now hospitals appear to be capable of meeting demand, but an increase in the rate of spread increases the probability of people with pre-existing conditions who catch the virus need hospitalization. Lending further support to the “colder weather” theory is the fact that the new Michigan outbreak is in the Upper Peninsula.
Given the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision that the Governor has over-stepped her authority with her efforts to contain the disease and the Republican party’s preference to not issue mandates, it is likely the spread will increase unless citizens self comply or take county and city health orders seriously. I expect the State Legislature to pass legislation to prevent counties and cities from issuing their own health orders.
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HP and Lenovo have both recently announced new Chromebook Enterprise devices, the significance of which is that I imagine they will be the first to be able to run Windows apps.
HP unveils the first-ever Chromebook with AMD C-series processors
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Hidden color
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Last year I was in the motherland to see fall colors, this year I need to watch for the color around my house.
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Zeynep Tufekci’s report in The Atlantic, This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic, is an important read. I think a big contributor to the problems in the United States is a “not invented here” mindset. Rather than waiting on a vaccine I wish we would be rapidly distributing low cost rapid tests.
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“Journalism isn’t a profession. It’s not even a trade. It’s a business. It’s a market-making function. When journalism can’t make money, it survives on the patronage of those it’s covering.”
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It is an argument along the lines of Camus’s “we must imagine Sisyphus happy”
A change in leadership will help, but many more people are contributing to our decline than Donald Trump.
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Google’s new custom Assistant shortcuts is an interesting enhancement that I just learned is on my Pixel 4a. One of the recommended shortcuts uses the Accuweather app but when I try to use it the assistant says there isn’t an app for that shortcut. I hope that this evolves in to something as powerful as Siri shortcuts.
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“They also explain that cortisone reduces hyaluronan production, which is why dexamethasone and other steroids can ameliorate symptoms and save the lives of patients experiencing severe COVID-19 complications.” – Doctors discovered a terrifying new coronavirus symptom that’s killing patients
Might explain why Trump was given dexamethasone.
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TP-Link’s Kasa smart plugs might be the most useful home automation tech that you can buy and right now you can buy a four pack for $27.
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Outlines, Wikis, and Wisdom
I have a great deal of respect for the people who layed the foundation of the computer technology I use today, people like Steve Wozniak, Dan Bricklin, Ward Cunningham, and Dave Winer. I follow Ward and Dave the closest because they actively write and because I use their work every day.
I am struck by the similarities and differences between Ward and Dave’s work. Ward created wiki, which is a tool he created to write and share pattern languages. Wiki’s emphasis is on easy writing and hyperlinking, which I think was the intended purpose of the Web. Dave also created writing tools, the outliner and blogs, that simplify publishing of writing on the Internet and he also created RSS to make it easier for one to keep up with the writing on the Internet. Dave’s original work is the conceptual basis for my stream while Ward’s original work provides the tools for my garden.
I like outlines and find that I really like Federated Wiki and today I realized that the similarity between them is that both provide context to writing but in different ways. Outlines are hiearchical while Federated Wiki has a lineup that shows context between source and destination links in a horizontal and linear fashion. I think this ability to easily see context and connections is also why I like Roam and use it for my private notes.
I am not sure that this matters much to others, but I think there is a relationship between context and history. History is the context of our lives and I think a great deal of our problems come from a failure to see meaning or to see what is really happening because we fail to know the context. Part of the problem may be that it’s too difficult to find the context of history, that’s where tools like oultliners might help, and because it is so difficult few people really take the time to seek out and understand context.
Context is needed for true understanding, knowledge, and thus wisdom and today there is a huge deficiency of wisdom.
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Pairagraph is an interesting site, with an interesting starting dialog about whether America is in decline that Om Malik is participating in. I find my reaction is less about whether or not I agree with Om as much as the fact that he appears to associate Amercia’s not decline with wealth. Fixation on wealth as a measure of success is a uniquely human problem that is becoming more problematic, particularly for the United States. Should freedom and liberty be defined in wealth terms?
As to the site… why couldn’t the dialog occur between two people writing on their own blogs?
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