FailForward @FailForward@social.cleverlibre.org
Exploring, failing, backtracking, just to identify the only viable path forward. And then scarred, stumbling forward into the future. Learning.
Boring and steady. Knowing little and questioning a lot. Mostly harmless.
***
This is an experimental scrapbook space. A collection of stuff I want to keep in a form somewhere on the spectrum between a blog and a shoe-box full of scraps, cut-outs, quotes, links and reading notes and sometimes my own silly thoughts about them.
Perhaps it might be of marginal interest to others too, but I don't care that much.
Joined Jan 2021
And another one in the same mood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLEX5Msmtxk
Life's OK...
Indila - S.O.S
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m65jhGwtWrg
Some easy French pop into my head this morning.
Sometimes I am myself surprised by the mix and breadth of music styles I listen to from metal. Effectively almost anything. Whatever. As far as I enjoy it, there's nothing wrong with light entertainment.
FailForward
boosted
It's illegal to enter buildings in the zone as most of them are completely unstable, and due to a new zone administration there's typically no bribing your way out of a situation. Sometimes in the most unsuspecting places you may find street art left behind by a Stalker who risked arrest for something many will never see. Somewhat of a real life Easter egg, or a subtle nod to defiance: "You're not suppose to be here."
Location: Chernobyl Exclusion-zone, Ukraine. 2019.
In my circles, there are now many non-tech friends/acquaintances who newly woke to the reality of privacy issues and are now attempting to flee WhatsApp because the bad big corp can snoop on them.
Now these are the same people who use Gmail as their primary (and often the only) e-mail provider!
Technically speaking, in the case of WhatsApp, if we should believe FB, only the metadata is leaked to the bad corp, as the content is encrypted. Bad enough. The purpose is behavioural profiling and selling advertisement.
Now, in the case of Google, you give them metadata AND the content and the purpose is the same: behavioural profiling and selling adverts.
What an irony.
> For all but the most self-deluded, identifying why we feel a certain way is not an insurmountable challenge.
> -- [Mariella Frostrup/The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/feb/21/i-am-having-fantasies-about-men-who-look-like-my-father-mariella-frostrup)
* snowboarding - fun
* waterboarding - not so much
# Variable tyre pressure gadget for mountain biking
On-the-fly adjustable tyre pressure inflation system. Custom rims and wheelset. This is quite a cool device there.
# Earth Harp
Earth Harp: It is a musical instrument where free floating strings anchored at long distances on building, or a canyon. It's the world's longest instrument. Ther anchor it on landscapes and architecture to play.
It's so large that the audience is effectively inside the instrument.
William Close is the guy who invented this instrument.
A reference to lean start-up way of doing things in another thread reminded me of this.
BTW, rakhim.org guy has some very good comics drawings. Recommended!
FailForward
boosted
🇳🇱
I really do love heat map visualizations of data, there is a certain beauty to it when seeing patterns emerge.
The following is a chart from a study that shows how peoples mobility in parks has been affected by covid. Original study can be found here:
https://www.openriskmanagement.com/2021-02-06-visualization-of-a-planet-in-lockdown/
#Science #Data #DataScience #Statistics #math #maths #Mathematics #COVID #COVID19 #Corona #coronavirus
> We don’t often encounter an author capable of denouncing “the tyranny of Orwellian syntax” while arguing in the same breath, literally and without irony, that freedom is slavery.
> Matt Taibbi in _Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual_ at https://taibbi.substack.com/p/marcuse-anon-cult-of-the-pseudo-intellectual-1d3
Mildly entertaining, somewhat boring. But the ending quip is worth a Jeremy Clarkson ending bombshell medal. Clearly, sometimes one needs to write a full essay, just to get an opportunity to drop the single bombshell line at the end.
FailForward
boosted
Ttrolling modern USSR lovers (who are also usually very conservative) with old Soviet posters of what we would today describe as same-sex couples 😂
# China's naval fleet is becoming a force to reckon with
So I read that China's naval force is becoming powerful.
> Sometime between 2015 and 2020, China’s Navy crossed a critical threshold: it fielded more battle force ships than the U.S. Navy, making it the world’s largest navy numerically. Today, at around 360 hulls, it exceeds its American rival by more than sixty warships.
The article goes on to summarise the recent ship-building achievements by the China's naval forces. It's clear, the force-projecting machine is on the rise. This is especially worrying in the context of the regional waters around China, especially South China Sea disputes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea).
This has implications in regard to the rise of hi-tech as a strategic asset: production of computer processors is becoming a strategic and vital military issue. C.f., e.g., the insightful article by Ben Thompson here: https://stratechery.com/2020/chips-and-geopolitics/. It boils down to this observation: _chips are everywhere and especially so in advanced weapons. You can't win a war without chips. Who owns chip production, owns a strategic resource and it provides them a freedom to operate in military theatre._
The most advanced chip production facilities are owned by TSMC and reside in Taiwan. The fact that EU and USA are becoming disadvantaged in chip production (it's of course way more nuanced, but generally true) is a strategic military planning concern. China's growing ability to project naval power and to capture Taiwan if it decides so are, in this sense, problematic.
There's one more interesting observation:
> More broadly still, it offers modern history’s sole example of a “land” power successfully becoming a “sea” power and sustaining that status over time.
Indeed, as well argued by e.g., G. Friedman in [The Next 100 Years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_100_Years:_A_Forecast_for_the_21st_Century), China is a land power. It's limited by it access to the Pacific Ocean by all the islands it needs to navigate to get to the Ocean. So regardless of their fleet size, their capability to project power beyond this region is limited as far as they do not control the whole archipelago between Japan and Indonesia. So far, they don't. Their growing naval capability, however, potentially threatens that to change. That well explains the growing USA obsession with China and Taiwan issues: threaten the control of Pacific Ocean by USA and you get their attention.
This is one of the slowly moving games played out there, curious to see further developments in the coming decades.
FailForward
boosted
@jwildeboer @jwildeboer Maybe it's time to swap the connections to fill your timeline with some more positive news :-).
Seriously, I get your point. Methinks, on the one hand what you observe is natural, on the other there clearly is hope.
As a therapist explained to me the other day, human beings (as all wild animals) are naturally wired to be extremely sensitive to threat and then go into fight or flight mode. It's a matter of survival in wilderness and as such it is a good thing(tm). As a result, we are naturally wired to focus on potential threats, that is, all the negative things around us. The conclusions is somewhat dark: people, when left to their own devices, tend towards negativity. That's the normal.
We, however, have the ability to "fix ourselves". We don't need to live our lives in fear scared for the sabre toothed lion to jump on us. But that requires effort. To think positively requires energy, it does not come naturally. One needs to constantly reminded oneself and her/his surroundings that there are things to cheer. While I am not a proponent of forced positivity, simple techniques, like gratitude journaling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude_journal), or just consciously focusing on the more positive messages than negative ones helps a lot.
Myself, for instance, I see quite some positive messages around me. For instance in my saturday note here: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/105723219489655944 - e.g., read more lifestyle column of your favourite newspaper. Silly, but works. Elsewhere, this morning, I see here at Mastodon people opening up about their political preferences (https://qoto.org/web/statuses/105732464266923083) - that's nice. I find also some pixelfed photo streams of people around really nice (with simple pics from walks, or hikes) as they show their simple, normal life with some positive moments in it.
1) carve out some small energy every to seek positive; 2) seek positive. And let us know about the good outcome :-). Good luck there!
@matt I am not sure this renders well on your instance...
Also, I consistently want quote-tooting on #Mastodon.
Exploring, failing, backtracking, just to identify the only viable path forward. And then scarred, stumbling forward into the future. Learning.
Boring and steady. Knowing little and questioning a lot. Mostly harmless.
***
This is an experimental scrapbook space. A collection of stuff I want to keep in a form somewhere on the spectrum between a blog and a shoe-box full of scraps, cut-outs, quotes, links and reading notes and sometimes my own silly thoughts about them.
Perhaps it might be of marginal interest to others too, but I don't care that much.
Joined Jan 2021
