Thoughts
We Found Where Is The Republican Line
It’s amusing and sad to finally see so many Republicans jump off the sinking ship after it hit the iceberg. All through the last four years my question to Republicans has been, what is your line that Trump could not cross? We found the line was literaly no less than an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. And these are people who call themselves patriots? If they really want to do the right thing they should resign.
The thing is, it doesn’t really matter now. What’s going to matter is when in four years and the Republican Presidential primaries start does the party push back against Trump and any who follow his playbook, or do they do all the same things again? It already started when Congress finally reviewed and accpeted the Electoral College results.
At this point I think the lust for supremacy is what Republicans are all about. They could not take a principaled stand until literally forced to by an attempted coup. I for one right now cannot imagine how I can ever trust anyone who is Republican and desires the power of federal office. We cannot let Republicans re-frame the story in a way that does not make them culpable in what happened on January 6, 2021, for they built the platform upon which Trump and his followers spoke and acted, starting with birtherism.
What ought to be clear to Congress, the DOJ, to the Armed Forces, and anyone in power that is not associated with Trump is that IF Trump is NOT removed from office now then at a minimum they must prepare to act swiftly to respond to the actions of this rogue President. Anything less is at best negligence. Trump is a hostile and the threat he poses needs to be taken seriously. No more “what harm can he do” attitude from anyone in power. Up to this point not enough people have accepted nor acted on the threat Trump presents.
And for the world’s sake, find some way to get the football away from him!
I believe that those willing to step out of the forest are seeing the thrashing of the withdrawal symptoms of a society deeply addicted to itself.
I do not take comfort in SCOTUS deciding to not take up Texas’ lawsuit against the four swing states. First, SCOTUS simply hid behind procedure and thus were not the adults in the room standing against tyranny. What is even more troubling to me is that I am sure President Trump fully expected “his” SCOTUS justices to keep him in office, I am sure in his mind that is what they owed him for seating them. The fact that any person considers any judges to be “his,” particularly Justices is frightening.
What we must learn from this episode of U.S. history is that it matters how anyone who would be President views the powers and responsibilities of the office. The U.S. Constitution is not intended to give anyone extreme powers, its intention is exactly the opposite. The fact that people think elections are all about power shows how much we have strayed from the founding principles of the United States.
If we don’t learn from this year and make meaningful changes then all we have done is prevent the end of the U.S. for the time being and increased the likelihood that it will not see its tricentennial. It takes more to preserve freedom than waving a flag and standing for the national anthem.
Tim Wu makes a good case that the vaunted “checks and balances” of the U.S. constitution has not really shown to be reality. The only thing that has prevented democracy in the U.S. from being overthrown has been the integrity of a frighteningly small number of people.
In my opinion we must not allow Republicans to paint a picture that this threat has only been because of Donald Trump. None of what we have endured is due to just Trump, in fact a case can be made that none of it is on Trump, instead it has all been on the Republican Party. Never forget, Trump won the Republican Party nomination for President, and if he had not then we would have not had four years of a Trump presidency and who knows how many fewer lives would have been saved from the pandemic.
We can’t be patting ourselves on the back thinking democracy prevailed. All that we really have is possibly a victory of one battle, but Republicans have been waging war on the United States since the 1940s and will continue fighting that war in to the future. As long as there is no consequence on Republicans they will remain to be a clear and present danger.
I am still bumming since learning on Friday that Len Kasper is leaving the Chicago Cubs to be the lead radio announcer for the White Sox. What I like about Len is that he is a genuine baseball guy, he isn’t a broadcaster who also does baseball, so moving from TV to radio makes sense. Of all sports baseball is best for radio.
My life experience with the Chicago Cubs has always been narrated by TV play-by-play guys: Jack Brickhouse, Harry Caray, Chip Caray, and Len Kasper. There have been a few others who have been briefly behind the mike, but these are the voices that replay in my head.
The first words are Jack’s calling another Dave Kingman home run. Most of the words are spoken by Harry, who was with me from teenager to adult. Chip is sentimental following his grandfathers death, where Len will always be part of the Cubs finally making it to and winning the World Series in 2016.
White Sox fans are getting a great baseball guy to tell them the White Sox story when baseball starts in 2021. I might try to listen to a few games, particularly when the White Sox come to Detroit and Len sits closer to Ernie Harwell’s seat. In the meantime I’ll watch for who will be next at broadcasting for the Cubs.
What To Do With Ideas
I’ve responded to this question about “what does one do with ideas” with my wish for how products like Roam could be even better for me. In summary, I want an app like Roam that recognizes a string of text as the same as the title of an already existing page and automactically converts it to a link to that page without my having to specify it as such with square brackets.
I think the challenge is putting the “new idea” in a place that is connected/related in a way that easily re-surfaces. A common practice is to put all ideas in to one bucket/tickler file and then continually reviewing that bucket/tickler file, which itself requires discipline.
Roam has a nice feature that enables me to easily associate text to a future date so when that date arrives the app automatically displays that item. Roam isn’t unique in this feature and associating to dates is probably an easy problem to solve, but what I would like would be an automated way associate an idea to a topic that can re-surface whenever I search for or write about the topic.
The closest example I can think of is glossary function in Fargo or wiki links in Roam but even those require remembering special functions, quotes for glossary, square brackets for wiki links. What I would love is to be able to tell software, whenever I write this string of text automatically convert the text to a hyperlink to this page of more information about it. For software to just do it for me it would have to constantly monitor my writing, like MS Word’s spell/grammar check.
If memory serves, the closest experience I had to this was VoodooPad and WikiWikiWeb were you wrote in wikiwords like WhereIPutIdeas, that the software automatically converted to links, but that is flawed by the fact that one has to write in an unnatural way.
I guess what I want is some form of natural language processing of all text I write that queries against a collection of previously written pages and automatically links to matches. Even the backlinking in Roam requires some thinking/recollection on my part, unless there is something in Roam I have not yet discovered.
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.
Kevin Tofel’s review of the Microsoft Duo is worth reading because it might be the most optimistic, if not down to earth, of the reviews I’ve read. A reason might be that not once did he refer to the price and thus didn’t get in to the “for this price one should not have these problems” trope. IMHO any gadget priced north of $1K is too expensive even if it works perfectly!
So, if price is an issue, save the time and the pixels and just write, “it’s too expensive” and move on. Because Kevin is not on a mission to drive home the point that the device is too expensive, he focuses more on the actual problems and frankly, what he writes about seem to be something that Microsoft could address in software updates.
The most important point that Kevin makes, though, is about the biases toward what the Duo is, even though Microsoft has emphasized it is not a phone or a tablet.
I think people are calling the Duo a phone because that’s the closest device comparison they can make. And I get that. But the Duo truly is something different and, along with other folding or swivel screen devices, early in the trend of a new device class.
And I like this thought…
And although Microsoft dubbed it the Duo over a year ago, I think the company should have said that “Duo” is just an internal product code name. A better, more descriptive name would have been Surface Booklet because that’s really what it is: A connected book-like tablet.
To be fair, I noted before that Brad Sams also took effort to emphasize the Duo being a class on its own, although he used device classification of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Computing Is Art
I’ve read two articles this week that make the case for treating Computer Science as something other than Computer Science. The one, titled, Why Computing Belongs With The Social Sciences, argues that we will not gain more ethical computing from college curricula that have “Computing Ethics” classes but only by moving Computing in to the Social Sciences. The author points to the increasing relationship between algorithms and power.
Recommendation algorithms, automated sanctioning systems, reactive violation detection and prediction systems, and nudge architectures are replacing the human agency built into our legal and political systems with an architecture of unknowable black boxes allowing the one-way surveil and control of people without any corresponding contestation
In an essay titled Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham notes that while he graduated with a Computer Science degree, he self identifies as a hacker, which is the likely image most people have of one who holds a CompSci degree. Graham says that hackers are like painters and writers because they make things. The following is for me the most important quote in the essay.
Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to empathy are practically solipsists. It’s hard for such people to design great software [5], because they can’t see things from the user’s point of view
Both articles resonate strongly with me. I graduated in 1989 with a Computer Science degree and have been working in the Information Technology industry for more than thirty years and I can say that I have never used any of the specifics of my computer science classes save for one, one Software Engineering. I also got a minor in secondary education and what gained from that part of my college learning I applied frequently throughout my career.
In my experience computing is more art than a science and more about humans than machines and yet neither of these realities were part of my formal computer science education. Granted, much time has passed since I graced the college classrooms so I know curricula has changed, but yet given the “market” pressures on colleges I suspect the most focus on producing employable graduates, with life long skills a secondary benefit rather than primary focus.