Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum is a wonderful museum/arcade of all sorts of vintage games, and like many small businesses is hit hard by COVID-19. It still cannot open due restrictions posed by the State of Michigan. You can help this small business stay afloat by contributing on this GoFundMe
Finished reading: Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible by Peter Enns, Jared Byas 📚
Currently reading: Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs: The Simple Truth About Food, Weight, and Disease by David Kessler 📚
Currently reading: The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Church History: Flaming Heretics and Heavy Drinkers by Bill Leonard, Tripp Fuller 📚
Cooler temps with 🌞, in other words, pleasant weather.
“Just remember this: no one can keep you from the second half of your own life except yourself. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid. My conviction is that some falling apart of the first journey is necessary for this to happen, so do not waste a moment of time lamenting poor parenting, lost job, failed relationship, physical handicap, gender identity, economic poverty, or even the tragedy of any kind of abuse. Pain is part of the deal. If you don’t walk into the second half of your own life, it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful.”
Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
It seems as though the weather in southeast Michigan the last two days has been influenced by Hurricane Laura. Yesterday’s storms have given way to 17 mph wind gusts and 73 degree temps. Not bad sitting outside by feels too cool on occasion.
Dear Google, You do a wonderful job of making it easy to move from one Android phone to another but moving a Wear OS watch along with that phone is horrible. Please bring back the ability to install and manage apps from the phone. I should not have to factory reset and reinstall all watch apps just to move to another phone.
Taken with the Pixel 4a
Smartphones are much more useful when they can connect to the mobile network.
Here is the thing…we think liberty is about our government, but on its own it says nothing about what one does with that liberty. Some will claim it makes them free to do whatever they want, while others will say it makes us free to make the best society for everyone.
The headline is NOT that Putin basically ran the 2016 Trump campaign, the headline is that people know this AND THEY DON"T CARE!
They = the United States Senate but many Republican voters too.
The House plainly made the case for impeachment and the Senators had the evidence AND STILL did not care enough to impeach.
They are ok with an authoritarian as President so long as that person is in their party. Funny how much they complained about Obama’s executive actions, but have no problem with Trump doing the same thing, and more.
The consequences? 176,991 American’s dead on U.S. soil.
What we are currently dealing with is the struggle between what we want and what is.
While the weather in July was hot, the weather in August in Michigan this year has been glorious.
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.
I received the case for the PIxel 4a that I ordered from Google, but no shipment notification yet for the phone. The case does confirm that the 4a is just a little taller than the Pixel 2.
I postulate that a consequence of the pandemic is an increase in the amount of garbage added to land fills. During my morning walks on garbage day I have observed that my neighbors have been doing a lot of house cleaning, so I bet it’s not a good time to be a garbage collector. #randomthought
Forgot the strangest part about tonight’s seven inning, pandemic doubleheader, which is that the Cubs are the road team at Wrigley in game two.
Last year, about Chicago Cubs, I wrote:
The problem is not the hitting, although they could be more consistent. To me the problem is the bullpen, they are giving up too many runs in the 6 thru 9th innings. Nobody in the pen is reliable.
I could not imagine that at the same time a year later the Cubs would be playing under such strange circumstances like they will today, playing two seven inning games in a “pandemic” double-header. Yet, while the Cubs have the best record, the bullpen performance has not been much different.
The Chicago Cubs have now lost three games in a row. Normally that would not be a problem, but in a short season, it feels like they really need to win at least one game today against the Cardinals. Preferably win both.