Blogging – Page 3 – Me on the net

Two Hundred and Fifty

This post will be my 250th. 250 times approximation 1,000 words. A quarter of a million words. Wow. I didn’t think that I could do it. I hit the target. I reached the summit of Everest. I ran a marathon. And other similar metaphors for success.

Of course, I could be posting into a void. I see that I get, usually, a few dozen views for each post and some people are actually “following” me. I even, now and then, get a comment. I’ve done zero in the way of self promotion. I finish each post, figuratively pat it on its back and send it on its way, never to be seen again.

This doesn’t concern me. It seems that, for me, writing this blog is a bit like playing a piano in an empty room, or doing a jigsaw on the Internet. The reward is in the doing. I certainly feel a sense of achievement when I hit the “Publish” button, but I don’t often follow up on the post.

What I found amazing is my ability to ramble on for 1,000 words on any subject. I reckon that I could probably stretch any subject out to 1,000 words. In fact, I usually go over. Around the 300 to 400 word mark I’m wondering if I will reach the 1,000, and then suddenly I’m a couple of dozen words past the mark and wondering how to stop. Many times I will just stop so if you think I dropped a subject abruptly, you are probably right.

Some subjects have come up more than once. If you have been a regular reader you will have noticed themes running through my posts. There’s science, particularly physics and cosmology, there’s philosophy, there’s maths. I’ve tried to steer away from politics, but Trump has crept in there somewhere.

There’s weather, there’s seasons, there’s discussion on society, as I see it, and occasionally I discuss my posts themselves. These things are, obviously, the things that interest me, the things that I tend to think about.

Apparently I have 144 followers. That’s 144 more than I expected. I hope that some of them read my posts on a regular basis, but that’s not necessary. I hope that more dip in from time to time and find some interest nugget.

That sound disparaging to my followers, but that’s not my intent. My intent is to reflect on the realities of blogging. I follow other blogs, but I don’t read all the posts on those blogs. Maybe one or two of them I read pretty much every time the blogger posts a new post.

Someone's blog post — Someone’s blog post

That’s the reality of blogging I think. Millions of blog plots are published every day, and I reckon that very few of them are read by more than one or two people at the most. Some blogs strike the jackpot, though, and have millions of followers.

I’d guess that the big blogs are about politics in some shape or form, or fashion and fashion hints and tips. Maybe cooking? I’ve seen a few cooking blogs and they seem to be quite popular. Some big firms have taken to publishing a blog. Some people blog about their illnesses and their battles with it. The best of the latter can be both sad and uplifting.

You know the sort I mean? You go to the firm’s website and there’s a button or menu item that proudly proclaims “Blog”. When you look at the blog, it’s simply a list of what the CEO and board have been up to, or releases of new products, or sometimes posts about workers at the firm getting involved with the local community. All good earnest stuff, but scarcely riveting. I wonder how many followers they get? Probably about as many as me! I hope so. At least they are trying.

(Approaching 600 words of waffle. I can do it!)

Since I’m not doing a political blog, I don’t think that anything I post is controversial, which is probably reflected in the number of my followers. I don’t stir up any furores with my words on Plato’s Cave analogy, so far as I know. I get no furious comments about my views on Schrodinger’s Cat. “You should see what he says about Plato’s Cave! You must go on there and refute it!” Nah, doesn’t happen!

As I said, the low number of hits doesn’t worry me. It would be a hassle if suddenly my followers shot up to thousands, and I felt obligated to provide all these people an interesting post on a regular basis. As it is I can ramble on about prime numbers or the relationship between the different number sets and potentially only disappoint a few people. If any.

What have I learnt from all this blogging? That it is hard. It’s not just a matter of sitting down and blasting out a 1,000 words. Well sometimes it is, actually, but most times I grind it out in 100 word or so chunks. I aim to write the blog on Sunday and add pictures and publish on Monday.

Sometimes I miss the Monday deadline, out of sheer forgetfulness, mostly and pop it out on Tuesday or even later. Sometimes I forget to write my post until late on Sunday, but it is only rarely that I have to write it on Monday or even later. So far as I can tell, I’ve not completely missed a weekly post since the earliest days.

This is not the first blog I’ve tried to write. I had several goes before this one and I think that maybe this attempt “stuck” because I set out my aim to publish weekly early on. Maybe. It may also be the target of 250 posts that I set myself early on. Now I’ve achieved that goal.

So what next? I’ve not decided. I might stop now, or I might go on to 500. I may not know right up until the last minute. 500 posts is approaching 10 years of posts which seems a phenomenally long time. But then again, 250 posts is around 5 years of posts and I achieved that. We’ll have to see.

(As I sail past 1,000 words, I reflect that I can extract that many words from practically nothing. It seems to be a knack.)

The Universe in a Hair Tie

Hair Ties

I’m constantly bemused by the Universe. Why are some things the way they are? What is the Big Bang all about? Why Quantum? Why do people seemingly like to kill other people? Obviously on average this last is untrue, but that’s little comfort when a significant portion appears to be inflicting mayhem, in the forms of wars, terrorism, traffic accidents and even simple murder, on other people.

But let’s not get too serious. One quirk of the universe caught my eye in the supermarket. No, it wasn’t the solid wall of fizzy and sugary drinks. It wasn’t the half wall of cotton wool masquerading as bread. It wasn’t even the rows of vegetables liberally sprayed to make them look fresh, or the wall of salty crunchy snacks indistinguishable in look and taste to everyone except teenage boys who are picky connoisseurs of the things.

Chip Aisle

No, it was a humble object, a truncated ice cream cone shaped in plastic containing a small bag of hair ties, the sort of thing that girls use to put their hair in bunches. At first sight a good idea. It can sit on the dressing table, resting on the flat base, and the owner can remove one or two ties as required and replace them in due course.

Except – The truncated cone didn’t look very stable and the ball just rested on the cone, and would presumably roll away if the cone was upset. And the ball. In my limited experience of hair ties, they end up capturing loose hairs, the sparkly sheath snaps exposing the elastic core, or the elastic core breaks rendering them useless. They don’t have a long life.

Pigtails

In addition they get lost. Just like the planet of lost pens there is a planet of lost hair ties. Like the pens the hair ties rings around the planet just as ice and rocks form rings around Saturn. Just like a pen you can put one down anywhere and when you come back the hair tie has completely disappeared. Because of some law of probability or something sometimes there’s a pen in its place bearing the logo of some firm that you’ve never heard of and which operates in a different area to the one that you live in.

So after a while the semi stable holder of a ball of hair ties becomes a depleted bunch of hairy broken hair ties and a tipped over holder which has rolled off under the bed. I admit that much of the above is speculation. I’m not a girl, don’t wear hair ties, and I’m not an astronomer or statistician. But I suggest you try the experiment. Buy an ice cream holder and hair tie ball set and observe what happens. I reckon that it will be uncannily like the scenario I suggest above.

Ice Cream Cone

But think of all the unlikely things that had to happen to create that unlikely supermarket item. Firstly we had to have the Big Bang. But not just any Big Bang. This one. A slightly different Big Bang may not have resulted in a liveable Universe. The Big Bang might also have created a liveable Universe but not one where life evolved.

Life evolves on planets. Planets revolve around stars. Stars and planets have to be of right sort that life can evolve on. One of the things that is essential is a mix of elements which can only be created in the heart of a star. You see, the Universe is mostly hydrogen, as free protons, the occasional hydrogen atom, and the even rarer hydrogen molecules.

Pens

And that would be it, but some of the hydrogen/protons condensed into clumps or clouds, which grew until gravity compressed the hydrogen atoms to the point where they fused and produced helium and gave off energy. Stars. Generation I stars. Eventually pressures increased to the point where other elements started to be produced, and finally the stars exploded!

The Big Bang that started all this is the precise one that embodied or encoded all the nuclear interactions that I’ve just mentioned. Oh, there is a possibility that there was only one possible Big Bang – the one that led to us, but that doesn’t explain why all the universal constants have the values that they do. If any had been slightly different we wouldn’t be here.

Big Bang

When the stars exploded all the elements necessary to life were blasted into space. Over billions of years these very rare elements condensed to become our sun, and our earth. The earth and any rocky earthlike planet consists of a vast collection very rare atoms. We consist of a vast collection of very rare atoms that have somehow sprung to life. You can almost see the point of that religionists make when they say that such happenings as you and I could not have occurred by chance.

But of course they are wrong. Chance is the only reason for things happening, and it is so long since the Big Bang that unusual clusters of rare atoms, such as us, even though they are of very low probability, have come to pass, and all this was implicit in the Big Bang.

Periodic Table

By some chance some collection of very rare elements sat down one day and thought about hair ties and how to keep them tidy and protect them from being lost and came up with the ice creme cone concept. I’ve wondered about the concept above, and whether or not it is in fact a useful one. My feeling is that the flaws outweigh the advantages, but of course I may be wrong.

For all I know, the concept works fine, and is the greatest advance in hair tie technology since someone had the original concept of a hair tie. When you think about it, it is a pretty cool technology which does away with the need for ribbons and strings, and the difficulties of tying and adjusting them. The ice cream cone holder concept could be the next step in the evolution of hair technology.

Hair Tie Balls

The truly wondrous thing though, is that the ice cream cone hair tie holder concept and its execution and appearance on the supermarket shelves is implicit in the Big Bang. The Big Bang led to stars, supernovas, more stars, planets, life, supermarkets and ice cream cone hair tie holders, and that is truly amazing.

Supermarket

The Lurg

The invading army expanded in both directions from their beachhead. Soon they were almost everywhere, even invading the outlying areas. The resistance had little time to prepare, but soon they were building up their forces. The battle raged everywhere, noticeably raising the temperature.

Yes, I have the lurgy. It started a week ago with a sore throat and progressed to a crippling cough. Soon I was aching all over and doing anything at was getting very hard. My muscles ached from coughing and my back hurt, probably as a secondary result of the coughing.

I felt hot and sweaty, and got an appointment with the doctor. She told me that it was a “viral infection” and that I had to “last it out”. I didn’t have bronchitis or pneumonia fortunately, so I came out of the medical centre with no prescription. That’s fine by me. Antibiotics wouldn’t help with a viral infection and most cold “remedies” are hokum.

What I had was a bit more than a cold though, so over the next few days I was mostly collapsed in bed, sometimes listening to radio or playing games on the tablet. Did I feel sorry for myself? Not really, but my mood was sombre. Even in the depths of depression I haven’t felt sorry for myself and I rarely do. It seems a pointless way to feel, and depression, for me, is colouring of the world as grey (but see below), not a personal attack by the Universe.

Depression means many things. I was searching for an image related to the mental condition but came up with the meteorologic phenomenon instead.

The thing about this particular “viral infection” is that it has left me feeling weak and tired 24 hours a day. Sleep has not been easy as I wake up sweating and coughing several times a night, once I drop off. It hasn’t been too good for my wife who has been disturbed by my nocturnal coughing spells.

Only once, fortunately, was I woken by the shivers. I hate the shivers. I felt reasonably warm in bed but my body decided it wasn’t. I struggled against the shivers for a while then snaked an arm out to grab a sweater. Fighting the weakness and the shakes I managed to pull the sweater on and still the shivers without getting out bed, then relaxed into the warmth. Of course I was soaking in sweat when I woke up. Yuck!

A deep cold or maybe flu like this makes things hard to do. There’s a general feeling of weakness, but I think that’s mostly a mental thing. I had to swing an axe at some blocks of wood out of necessity (It’s winter here) but I was able to do it, albeit with lengthy pauses to cough my lungs out, Muscles complain if you ask them to do work, but with “viral infection” they do that anyway.

Maybe the system is marshalling all resources to attack the invader and resents having to let resources go to other ends. Speaking of resources, food and drink lose their savour with a cold like this. Solid food tastes of nothing much and tea and coffee taste strange. (I don’t actually drink coffee so I’m extrapolating here!) I don’t know why this happens, but it’s like half of your taste buds are MIA and the others only have time to register “food of some sort”.

Also you eat at strange times. Struggling out of bed, it is often quite late in the morning before breakfast happens. Since my usual breakfast is pretty bland (oat biscuits and milk) you can imagine what it tastes like… Well pulped cardboard would probably have more flavour.

Lunch time has been straying into the early afternoon. Whatever is for lunch, it is probably quick and easy. Tinned soup, something on toast, or similar. Not that I can taste what it is, of course. I made scrambled eggs today (whisk eggs, pinch of salt, milk if wanted, pepper if wanted) and I had eaten half of it before I realised that I had forgotten the pinch of salt In normal times I would have spotted that in the first mouthful, even though I only use a little.

The really annoying thing, though, over the course of the battle for my body is that my brain functions have been “softened”. I think that’s the best word. Just like a landscape is softened by a veil of rain, my brain feels a little fuzzy, like an out of focus photograph. The sharp edges are still there, though it is more of an effort to utilise them.

Puzzles, for example, are doable, but with more effort than usual. I quite like Sudoku puzzles and can complete them at my usual level, but I’m tired afterwards. Even Solitaire (what else can you do when you can’t go out, when you’ve completed all the Sudoku puzzles available to you) can seem like a pretty daunting proposition.

I was going to mention colour, wasn’t I? Colour leaches from the world much like it does when depression hits. You look at something and the colours are there – you can notice to a block of red in something for instance – but somehow colour doesn’t figure much in the composite image that your eyes report to your, or is dropped as irrelevant by your brain. Something in the visual presentation of your vision system appears to dial down the colours.

It doesn’t go completely monochrome (though deep depression does, occasionally, for me). It’s just that colour seems to lose significance. It’s AS IF everything was grey and white until you actually look specifically at something. Still it is not as unpleasant as those time when depression blasts everything with light, where everything feels metallic, there is a metallic taste in the mouth. Total sensory overload that won’t stop. I call it the “neon world”.

Grey Skies - Belgium — Grey Skies – Belgium

I’m approaching the end of this post, which shows that I must be much improved from how I was before! Yeah! Yeah, the defenders of my internal galaxy! I still have the nose runs and still have the coughs, but the aches have retreated to only the coughing muscles. I think that I’m going to survive. Well, I always knew I would really, but it’s hard to maintain the positiveness when you’ve been coughing for 10 minutes and can’t see the end.

Fake News

All news is fake to some extent. When a reporter watches some event unfold he or she will have their own in-built and acquired biases, no matter how hard they try to keep them under control. Those who watch or read the news report will also have their own leanings and belief systems. In addition they will tend to view only those sources which fit with their world view.

Although I attempt to show that “news” as such is a severely distorted view of events, and that everyone has their own viewpoint on news events depending on their innate beliefs and acquired biases, this phenomenon is not restricted to news and the events that get reported by the news media. We filter all that we see through the sieve of these beliefs and therefore what we see conforms to our world view and naturally this acts to confirm these beliefs in our minds.

Back in 1991 Jean Baudrillard said that “The Gulf War did not happen“. Of course, he did not mean that the events referred to as “The Gulf War” or “The Liberation of Kuwait” did not happen, but that the events as reported by the US authorities and others were highly edited and presented in a way that but the US and its allies in the best possible light. Baudrillard also contended that the so-called war was not a war in the usual sense as the American troops did not directly engage in conflict with the opposing forces.

I am not arguing on the rights or wrongs of the Gulf War, as that is not the main purpose of my posting here, but that what was reported by the Western media was a distorted view of the events that happened during that war. As I live in a “Western” nation, the view that I and billions of others had was highly tilted in the direction of the United States. If I had been able to see the reporting of the Iraqi media, I am sure that I would have a very different view of the events. Similarly it too would also be highly distorted.

Neither viewpoint could be considered “right” or “wrong”, as such. Neither is intended to be an accurate record of what actually happened, while the events as reported happened, the interpretation of the events may omit or emphasise some aspect over others. One report may record that several “insurgents” or “terrorists” were killed, while another report of the same event will record that some “freedom fighters” were killed. One report may leave out the fact that “non-combatants” were killed while the other may call them civilians and children.

In recent times though, so-called “fake news” has had some attention in the media itself. Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” to explain the claim that President Trump’s inauguration had the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe”, when less partial estimates put the crowd at a much lower level than it was at the previous three inaugurations. She was widely ridiculed for this, though, to be fair, she maybe meant to say “alternative information” or “incomplete information”, as she has claimed.

Unfortunately for that interpretation, she later referred to something that did not happen. This may again have been a slip of the tongue or incorrect remembrance of the event referred to, but two such slips probably indicates that she should not be doing the job and should let other handle the interaction between the White House and the media. However while the media is focusing on her missteps they are not focusing on the President, and that may be the whole point.

Of course, “alternative facts” or alternative interpretations are not found just in politics, but in many walks of life. How many people have watched a sports match and have been surprised by the interpretation of the way that the match went that appears in the media. One group of supporters may think that the referee was biased in favour of the other team, while the opposition’s supporter might believe that the referee made the right calls. Of course it may depend a great deal on whether or not your team won!

However, in spite of all that I have said above, there has been a rise in recent time of true “Fake News” sites. These sites publish news items which are simply not true and the intent of these sites is to deliberately confuse and deceive those who read it. One interesting consequence is that China supported Americans who accused Facebook of spreading false news.

The most controlled regime outside of North Korea pointed out that in the free for all of democratic and liberal societies anyone could set up a web site and promulgate false news and views. In China however any site which published fake news would be hit by the full weight of the state. Of course the issue with this is that any site publishing views opposed by the state would be shut down immediately whether or not the news was actually fake.

The article on Chinese support for the opponents of fake news on Facebook come from the Huffington Post, and as such contains its own biases of course. Therefore the amount of credence that you put on the above article will depend on your political stance. However, it is likely that while the Huff may post satirical articles, it is unlikely, in my opinion, to post out and out fake news. Just use your brains when you read it, and be aware of your own and the site’s political biases.

The same goes for sites which promote miracle cures, or medicines which are outside of the mainstream medical province. Sites which promote anti-abortion, anti-vaccination, anti-fluoride, anti-folic acid, and other fringe beliefs really annoy me because they either ignore medical evidence or call into question by invoking conspiracy theories (“Big Pharma” anyone?) Beliefs like homeopathy and many other alternative medical beliefs belong with beliefs in psychic powers – in the rubbish bin of history.

Thus it was written….

1976 The beginning of flexible computing in pu... — 1976 The beginning of flexible computing in public health. Auditorium A at CDC, converted to a war room for the Swine Flu crisis, is filled with epidemiologists and a Digital Equipment PDP 11 minicomputer the size of a refrigerator. A program called SOCRATES, written in FORTRAN by programmer Rick Curtis, allowed an epidemiologist to define questions, enter data, and summarize the results in tabular form without the aid of a programmer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Have you ever noticed that a computer program never does exactly what you want? Oh, it will process your data for you, and produce results that you can use, or it will move those files from here to here, but may move ones that you didn’t want moving or leave ones that you did want to move. But it won’t do exactly what you want, first time with no hassles.

Of course you can make it work for you, make it do what you want more accurately, but you have to work harder to make it do so, and programs are supposed to make things easier, right? Take this very editor that I am using to compose this post. I thought the bold words above as I wrote, but I needed to perform an action to make them come out bold and another to ensure that the text after the bold words didn’t also come out bold.

JWPce is a Japanese Word Processor, this softw... — JWPce is a Japanese Word Processor, this software is under GNU license. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course this is a very minor consideration and if I were to find a program that changed the font to bold for one word and then stopped, I’d probably find it irksome to bold two words in succession. Also, I’d bet the house that there would be something that the first program did automatically or easily that would be difficult to achieve using the second program.

Those who are not programmers seem to have an ambivalent attitude to programs. On the one hand, if they are using a program and they can’t get it to work, they blame themselves. “I must be doing something wrong!” comes the impassioned plea. So the technophile in the household has to interpret what helpful statement “It doesn’t work!” really means and what how the program expects in the way of input. Problem fixed. Until the next time.

On the other hand, the non-programmer will accept it without question when the hero/heroine of the film briefly types something at the computer and the world is saved! Hooray! The sentient virus destroying humanity is defeated! Hooray again!

However these issues with programs are not bugs. The program is not doing something wrong. The issue is with our expectations of how things ought to work. It may well be that the program is designed to do things differently to those expectations, either because the programmer assumes that the way that he codes it is the way that people will expect things to work.



Embed from Getty Images

If the programmer gets a lot of issues with a particular feature of his program, he may decide to change it to fit more closely with the expectations of the users, and then send out an update. It is likely that he will then get a lot of issues from those people who have been using the program for a while and have come to expect it to behave the old way. The programmer can never win.

I’ve done quite a bit of programming over the years, thankfully mostly for myself. Every program that is written these days usually fits into what might be called an ecosystem. There are programs to gather data, programs to crunch data, and programs to display the results, but there are many programs to perform each of these three tasks.

For example, the results may be printed on a printer, either as a table of data, or as graph or pie chart, or in these days of 3-D printing, a physical object, or it may be displayed on a screen, or in any other way where the recipient can interrelate with it.

Data input may typed in, drawn in on a graphical input device, or it may be collected by some means or other from sensors or other devices. Your heartbeat may be collected from a number of sensors on your skin, read by a machine and be printed off on a roll or paper, while at the same time being displayed on a local screen. It may also be sent off to some remote location where specialists may peruse it.

In the middle, between input and output comes the processing or crunching of the data. This is what most people think of when they think of computer processing. Somewhat unfairly the input and output processes are relegated to only secondary interest. This is, however, what a program or system is written to do. Even so, input and output processes may be complex.

Data may be processed in several different ways in between input and output, and by several different programs. There are layers within layers. For example a program that takes advantage of a database uses many layers. The program which the programmer is writing will no doubt call programs (called APIs or interfaces) within the environment that he is working in which start the process of communicating with the database.

The API puts the programmers request into a form that the database expects and sends it to another process, not usually part of the programmer’s chosen system, which exists only to connect the programmer’s program (and any other similar programs) to the database.

At the database end the receiving part of the database system receives the request and passes it to the main database program, which checks it and executes it. During the execution process the database program makes calls to system programs which perform any necessary retrieval or writing of the data to the system’s file system, via the system’s hardware interface with the storage system.



Embed from Getty Images

I’ve collapsed many layers in the explanation above. The main point is that the programmer’s program is the tip of the iceberg, and there are many layers which are called into action during the execution of the program. To complicate things further, the system that the programmer uses to perform his work is also a program and has its own layers on top of layers.

This explains why programs don’t ever do exactly what you want. The programmer has to use utility programs which, while flexible can’t do everything. The utility programs are also flexible, but are interfacing with other programs, which while flexible also can’t do everything. And so on.

English: TM-database (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The more flexible a program is, the bigger it is, as it has be programmed to enable the flexibility. So, this forces constraints on it, which impose constraints on the programmer, whose program therefore imposes constraints on the user of the program. And those constraints are why the program can’t do exactly what you want, but usually, it’s close enough that the program is useful to the end user. Most of the time.

Trumpery

Donald Trump enters the Oscar De LA Renta Fash... — Donald Trump enters the Oscar De LA Renta Fashion Show, New York. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, as politics goes that was great theatre. Trump won when no one thought that he had a chance of even getting the nomination for the Republican Party. Trump as president is highly scary, not only for the US, but for the whole world.

Given that Trump is the man that he is, why on earth did anyone vote for him, let alone around half the people who voted? People have been puzzling the answer to this one ever since the election, and while it is clear from the statistics that there was a big swing to Trump by white non-college male voters – blue collar America.

It would easy to attribute this swing to gullibility and malleability of the non-college voters male voters. It would be easy to suggest that Trump’s evident charisma appealed to this sector of the electorate, but there must be more to it than that. Much more.

Notably the statistics seem to show that no other group of people fell for the Trump’s braggadocio like the white male non-college voters. Of course he turned off female voters to some extent by his behaviour and attitude towards women, but really, there was no huge backlash in that respect.



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It seems that Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” (trademarked by him in 2012) resonated with many Americans in this election, but it is not the first time it has been used. Several previous presidential candidates have used it. It implies that things were better in the past, but in general, that view is illusory, and one sees the past through rose-tinted spectacles.

“How many people long for that “past, simpler, and better world,” I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?”
― R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver

Another button that Trump pressed for many people, not the white, male, non-college voters alone was the race button. Technically one should not be called racist if what one says is the truth. Trump in many peoples’ opinions went a long way past that point.

While labelling Mexicans as all being drug dealers and rapist, he definitely went well past the point of propriety, but it appears that many people believe that there is a grain of truth there. In an American post-911 many people are wary of all immigrants, especially those from the Middle East. Again many people resonate with this.

Trump’s stated policies are ridiculous. Building a wall between Mexico and the US and making the Mexicans pay for it is silly, though I note that there are fences along much of the border already. A wall can be climbed over, tunnelled under, flown over or merely circumvented. All known walls of this type, Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, have all failed.

Trump threatens to catch and extradite all illegal immigrants in the US. Not only would this be fabulously expensive, it would cause immense upheavals and distress to many in the US, especially those families are mixed with legal and illegal immigrants. Apart from that the economy of California would collapse as many of the lower paid workers are illegal immigrants.

The threat to extradite all Muslims is not only silly, it is probably not legally possible. Many Muslims have been in the country legally for generations. A Muslim grandfather who came to America to escape conflict and even religious persecution in his homeland may face extradition merely because his sons or grandsons may at some time in the future become radicalised.

Trump’s policies may be ridiculous, they may be very expensive, but above all they may be impossible to carry out. Trump cannot write the laws himself, and there are some things that it may be legally impossible to do, and there may arguably be things that are constitutionally impossible to carry out. Trump’s policies may fail when confronted with political reality.

Trump appears to be passing off at least some of his powers to his Vice-President Michael Pence. This makes sense because Trump is a political novice and Pence has years of experience. At best this could make Trump look weak, and at worst, it could turn him into a puppet. As it is it seems that Trump is softening his stance on the issues that have assisted him to the Presidency.

This raises the question of what happens at the next election in 2020? If the Republicans don’t make any progress in addressing the issues that the white male non college voters have, if they don’t produce jobs, if people don’t see any progress in handling the illegal immigrant issue or the issues around Muslims in the US, it is hard to see him or the Republicans retaining the presidency and their ascendancy in the Senate and the House.

Trump could be a great president or middling president or useless president. While it is hard to read the future, going by his character, his lack of political abilities, the possibility that he will have roadblock after roadblock placed in front of him, and the almost impossible task of “Making America Great Again”, and the need to retain the loyalty of white, male, non college voters, I’m going to predict that he will most likely achieve very little, and will not get a second term.

In the mean time, while he is trying to actually achieve some of his goals, the Democratic Party has time to reflect, make changes especially to the party hierarchy and structure, and to win the loyalty of the voters. In particular they can reflect on what went wrong.

Would Bernie Saunders have done any better than Hillary Clinton? It is unlikely. The fact that Trump got selected for the race shows that voters wanted change and Saunders would most likely have provided a softer target for Trump.



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Should the Democrats select Saunders for President next time? Well, he is 75 now and will be 79 by the time of the next election, and that is ten years older than Ronald Reagan was when he became President. Incidentally Trump will become the oldest President to be elected when he is inaugurated.

I see some people are calling for Michelle Obama to stand in 2020. This doesn’t address any of the issues that this election has raised, so she would probably fail. In any case, she wisely says that she would not stand.

Milestones



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The previous post that I made was the 200th since I started writing this blog. I started in January 2013 and intended, at the time to make it about cooking and my successes and failures in that respect. However the cooking has pretty much disappeared (at least for now) and I’ve been writing about things like science, politics and philosophy. It’s strange how things turn out!

200 posts mean 200,000 words, more or less. However some of the early ones are shorter and so I’ve probably not quite reached the 200,000 word point yet. I aim to keep going at least until I hit 250 posts which implies a word count of 250,000 or so.

I, and most other bloggers I guess, blog about things that interest me. I don’t do it as a job, and I don’t seek out to address any particular set of people or demographic. I just hope that what I write is at least mildly interesting to those who stumble across it. I have around 100 “followers”, people who have subscribed to this blog, but I can’t tell how many of those skip over the emails that tell them that I have posted a new article.

Posting articles must fulfil some need that I have, but I don’t really know what it is. This is the first time that I’ve done something like this and not failed to keep it going. My random ramblings don’t spring out of a need to “reach out” to those out there. I don’t have a burning desire to see that my message is promulgated to all that will listen. I don’t even have a message.



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Nevertheless, blogs are a way of putting out there the things that interest me, like science, religion, and, basically, philosophy. It’s not a way of sorting out my thoughts and rubbing the rough edges off of my ideas. I don’t even think that my ideas are unique! When I do what little research I do while writing these articles, I often stumble across some article that addresses the same issues that I am writing about, probably in a more organised and coherent way.

I cite Wikipedia quite often, not because I think that it is the best reference collection on the Internet, but because I can almost always find an article on there on whatever topic I am searching for. Wikipedia is often criticised for being potentially inaccurate, and to some extent that is true as it is maintained by enthusiastic amateurs, after all. It does represent a good starting point for research and is generally not that bad.

When I started blogging I didn’t have any time schedule in mind, and I hadn’t settled on the target article size of 1000 words. As I recall the first few posts were sporadic and short. Some of the really early ones have been removed. It wasn’t until I settled on an article size of 1000 words and a publishing schedule of once a week that the blog took off (so far as I was concerned anyway) and I have been able to maintain the schedule over the last three years or so.

I originally intended to publish on a Saturday. This has slipped to Monday and I write these articles mainly on a Sunday. I’ve maintained this schedule for three years or so, and the nearest that I came to breaking the chain was when my sister was visiting and I didn’t have the time to write the articles. After she left I worked out how many weeks that I had missed and wrote and published the missing articles over a couple of weeks. It was one of the hardest things that I’ve done.



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I’ve taken inspiration from other bloggers. A friend of mine has a blog that he, until fairly recently updated with his photographs on a daily basis for many years. Well done, Brian!

Deadlines and milestones are, for me, the key to keeping up with this blog. Making a contract with myself to publish weekly affects no one else, unless someone out there is really waiting on the latest instalment of the blog, which I doubt.

Douglas Adams said about deadlines : “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” However, when I’ve blogged before I’ve found that missing a deadline has been fatal to my attempts to keep a blog going. Sure, I’ve missed a few but caught up again, and my self-imposed deadline has slipped a couple of times, so there must be other factors.

I think that I probably passed a watershed where I might have stopped if I missed a deadline and that watershed may have been at the 50 or so mark, where I would have been reaching about a year of posts. Anyway the longevity of the blog certainly aids in continuing when things get sticky.



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Things do get sticky. Sometimes I sit down to write, on a Sunday usually, and nothing comes to mind. I’ve never experienced a total “writer’s block”, though. I get through it by basically waffling about something until a theme comes to mind. That is not the case this time though!

Milestones are what we strive for. I want to keep going at least until the 250 post mark, but earlier on in the blog the milestones were far more modest. When I reached 50 posts that was a significant milestone, as where 100, 150, and now, 200.

Milestones show us how far we have come, and if we have a destination in mind, how far we have to go. The thing about milestones is that they shouldn’t be too far apart, and indeed a mile could probably be very loosely described as a reasonable distance that can be covered in a reasonable amount of time, and is roughly one thousand paces as measured by Roman legions on the march.

If milestones (general ones, not the specific distance related ones) are too far apart, then we often break that distance down into smaller parts. For instance, if we have a boring job to do, say weeding a garden we may break it into chunks – this bit to that shrub, then that bit to the peonies, then the bit to the small tree, and so on.

All the smaller, quicker to accomplish tasks give targets that are short to complete but which still add up to the larger goal in the end. It’s funny how we fool ourselves in this and other ways.



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Upgrading



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I’ve just upgraded my desktop computer system. I’ve replaced the CPU, motherboard, RAM, power supply unit, and disk drive. In fact what I’ve really done is build a new computer in the existing case, keeping only my keyboard, mouse and monitor.

I’ve not had any problems, apart from the fact that the pesky little screws that hold things together seem smaller and more fiddly than I remember, but that may just be my ageing fingers.

Incidentally I replaced the existing hard disk drive with a solid state drive or SSD. This is neither disk shaped nor does it have any moving parts, so its name is a bit misleading.

I’d had the previous computer for several years, so why did I replace it? Well, it was getting a little slow and some things ran very slowly on it. When I did a backup it would slow almost to a crawl. Its slowness was my fault really as I was trying to run far too much stuff on it. If I merely browsed the Internet and received and sent mail, and got rid of all the other baggage that I had acquired, it would probably have sufficed.

A modest junk box (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But where’s the fun in that! Having been system administrator in the past, I see interesting things coming through, like programs that simulate the running of an Android phone, so that you can write and test them on your desktop,. Wow! Now all I need is an idea for a killer app that can make me buckets of money.

So that went on the desktop, and I tried it out and lo! It worked fine. Then I moved on to something else and the killer app never got written. That seems to be the way that it goes with me – I see something cool, install it, and get it working, but once I get a handle on how it behaves, I lose interest.

I have nothing but admiration for people who have an idea, who then program it up, put it out there for people to try, and then deal with the inevitable bug reports and requests for enhancements and changes. Sometimes they modify and support the programs that they write for decades. Of course if they get bored with the whole thing, they can walk away from their baby and either the program becomes “abandonware” or someone else takes up the baton.

I can program though. I’ve written and supported programs and scripts which I’ve written for my job as systems administrator, and even at home I’ve written backup scripts and programs which are useful and, for the moment, complete, but I’ve got dozens of others which I started but did not complete for some reason or other.



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As an example, this blog uses WordPress as a platform. WordPress comes in two forms. There is the usual WordPress service, referred to as “WordPress.com” and there is “WordPress.org“.

The “dot org” version is an Open Source project with hundreds of volunteers writing code, packaging and otherwise making WordPress available to anyone wants to download it and use it on the computers that they operate and use.

Screenshot of WordPress interface (wordpress i... — Screenshot of WordPress interface (wordpress is under the GPL) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, many people don’t want to do download and run it themselves, either because they don’t have that sort of access to the computers that they use, or they are not technically competent enough, so the “dot com” version of the program is provided for people who simply want to use WordPress and not maintain it.

I set up this blog on WordPress.com initially, but wondered if it would be a good idea to run the WordPress.org version instead. So I downloaded it and installed it, and bingo! A clone of WordPress.com. Which was OK, but then I was faced with the need to find somewhere visible to host it – it’s no good having a blog if people can’t see it!

Multiple racks of servers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the end I decided to stay with WordPress.com as I didn’t need anything different from that version, and using WordPress.com avoid the hosting hassles. For a simple blog, without any esoteric bells and whistles, it is ideal. It can also be used for more complex situations, provided they don’t need changes to the core code.

Incidentally I started out with a Drupal site. I love Drupal and still have a Drupal site on my computer, which I tinker with occasionally. It’s a much more complex beast than WordPress (though WordPress is very flexible and extendable), but in the end, I don’t need the complexities at this time, so I moved to WordPress. One is not better than the other, they are just different.

drupal icon, svg version (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, I’ve tried many other content management or blogging tools and frameworks. A framework can be thought of as a “do it yourself” type of website building tool, a few steps up from writing HTML, and several steps below a complete content management or blogging system.

All the discarded and forgotten stuff on my computer was obviously slowing it down, but arguably more importantly, technology has moved on. The old CPU had a single core, whereas the new one has ten! Two gigabytes of memory was proving restrictive. The disks were old and slow.

So the upgrade happened and I’m very pleased with it. The CPU (currently) barely breaks into a canter. The RAM is extensive, and I’m sure there are bits that haven’t been touched! Above all the new SSD is fast and my browser opens in a snap. No doubt I’ll think of things to eventually slow it down, but for the moment it is great. All the crud is gone, but I still have it backed up. Once a sysadmin always a sysadmin – always take backups of your backups and never throw anything away!

Above all it is quiet! There is no disk noise, and the CPU fan is also quiet. I was telling my daughter how quiet it was and sure enough we couldn’t hear it running. OK, there was a bit of ambient noise from the grand-rats and the dog, but it was quiet. It wasn’t until they had gone that I discovered that it was actually switched off! But it really is that quiet.

Terrorism

Terrorism. It’s a hard subject to discuss rationally, because the very essence of terrorism is to stir up emotion. Fear or terror in the populations being attacked. Exultation and joy in the terrorist organisation. Horror and disgust in those not directly affected.

It demonstrates the relativity of morality. From the point of view of the terrorists there is nothing wrong with targeting people in the streets because they are considered less than people for believing differently from the terrorist, and therefore deserve to die. From the point of view of everyone else, this is callous sickening nonsense.

An interesting argument which bring home this point is the contention that, in the Star Wars films, that the rebels, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Hans Solo and all the rest are simply terrorists and not freedom fighters at all. After all, they kill people, destroy property and cause mayhem. They consort with criminals, use violence and trickery to advance their cause.

Since we only see their side of the issue, can we be sure that the Empire is the evil entity that it is portrayed as? For all we know the Rebel Alliance may be causing untold damage within the Empire, and their support may only come from a few disaffected planets.

The Death Star in A New Hope (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, in the real world it is easy to see who the terrorists are. Targeting and killing innocent people who can’t fight back is a heinous crime and cannot be justified in any way. People who use their religion to try to justify such actions are not right in the head.

The religious bigots interpret the words of their holy book or books to justify such things as punishing women who have been raped, and stoning to death people who have been caught committing adultery.



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Some would try to excuse terrorists by pointing out that all religions tend to lead to murder and torture, and this is so. Christians have raped, tortured and killed people who subscribe to other religions. Even sectarian disputes (such as that between the Christian Protestants and Christian Catholics) frequently lead to violence between the parties involved.

Some people use such facts to argue that religion causes its adherents to perform such violence against non-believers, but it is evident that adherents to mere ideologies will on occasion torture and kill non-adherents. Nazi Germany and Communist Russia are cases in point, but even the American military has been caught using torture on prisoners.

Torture and killing, along with random bombing and shooting targeted at killing or maiming and inducing terror in a population is never justified. That’s as close to a moral absolute as there can be.

Is there something in the human psyche that makes us want to kill and harm others, perhaps. Certainly a fear of strangers is large part of our make up, especially if the stranger is large. The big guy with the leather and the tattoos may be only returning the keys which you dropped in the street, but that doesn’t help when he comes up to you.

It doesn’t take much for fear to turn into violence, but that only helps a little with understanding terrorists. It is probably true that terrorists are scared of the religion or society that they are attacking. It is likely that they are incited by religious leaders who see others’ religions or beliefs as wrong, and that they believe that the end result of their actions will be rewards in the next world and the destruction of the “evil” that they are attacking.

The idea that you will die one day is scary to some people and the concept of an after-life is some consolation for that. In general religions tend to describe the after-life as like real life, but better. Or like real life, but worse, if you contravene any of the rules and laws of the religion. That’s a powerful incentive to follow the religion, and even if you can’t fully believe in God and the after-life, Pascal’s Wager suggests that it would be a good idea to try.

Terrorists act as if they fully believe that their religion or belief is true, in an absolute sense. They act convinced that they are doing God’s work in blowing men, women and children to bits, not to mention maiming many more. They must truly believe that they are working for the greater good, and that is true of any extremist. I can’t help thinking that either the fanaticism has crowded out any common sense that they might possess or they are so fanatical because they want to squash a small amount of doubt which cannot be assuaged.

The difference between terrorist and rebels is that a rebellion mostly doesn’t bring God into it, though exceptions exist, and generally a rebel will do his/her utmost to avoid hurting those who are mere bystanders, but it is not a black and white thing. Suppose I told you that to save billions of people you would need to kill, say, a thousand people in cold blood? Most people would have a problem with that.

As an example of this sort of thing is the example of the Death Star II in Star Wars. When building something that size, the Empire would have had to have employed millions or even billions of people, depending on how far the building process could be automated. If we assume that most of them were neutral about the Empire/Alliance conflict, then they were, in the horrible phrase, collateral damage.

Obviously that’s a contrived example, but it is true, as someone once said “History is written by the winner” (variously attributed to many people). If the Empire eventually wins the Alliance will be reviled as traitors. If the Alliance wins, then the rebellion overthrew a corrupt and oppressive regime. The winning side’s acts will be whitened and the losing side’s acts will be blackened.

None of the above should be seen as an apologia for the acts of the terrorists in Paris. In that case, the situation is as clear as it can be – these were terrible acts directed at those who were not able to defend themselves, who would have no idea that they should defend themselves. Who were murdered without warning, and mowed down without mercy, by people whose sick minds were harnessed by the sick terrorist organisation behind these crimes, to cause chaos, havoc and suffering. Terrorist pawns who were recruited from among the very people that they massacred.

The muse

(Whoops! I forgot to post this on Monday, though I had finished it on Sunday)

My musings are generally thought up on the spur of the moment, as I’ve said before. Sometimes I get an idea a few days before I write my post, but sometimes it will come to me when I open WordPress and click on the “new post” link. Today’s post is inspired by a new television show that has just started here, about someone who writes a newspaper column. “Inspired” is too grand a word for it really – the TV show gave me the idea.

I’ve set myself a target of a thousand words per week. The writer in the TV series (called “800 Words“) has a column that is exactly 800 words long. He has just suffered a bereavement and decides to take his kids and relocate to a small town in New Zealand.

Naturally the kids don’t want to go, and when he gets to his new home, it’s only half built and it isn’t the house that he thought it was. On the trip to the new house he meets a bunch of eccentric locals and stumbles on the local nudist beach. So far, so standard sitcom. I’ll have to see how it goes, but it has apparently gone down well in Australia.

The interesting thing to me, for the purposes of this blog, is the 800 words thing. OK, I set myself a target of over 1000 words, and I generally don’t go many words over that, but to keep it to exactly 800 words seems a bit obsessive. The writer, as part of the continuity of the story, is seen typing his article, and the number of words is shown on the screen.



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Now, I don’t (usually) take much notice of the structure of my blogs – I don’t do an intro, a body, and a wrap up, but I presume the writer does (or is supposed) as he is writing for a newspaper. That’s more complicated than what I do. I can imagine reaching around 900 words and realising that I need to do a wrap up in 100 words or so. Or worse, maybe, reaching 750 to 800 words and realising that you’ve covered your main points and the wrap up is going to have to be stretched to 200 to 250 words.

Of course he is a professional writer so such matters are his bread and butter. This brings me to another point. He gets paid for his column, and apparently gets paid enough to feed himself and his kids! This is slightly more than a little bit unbelievable, to say the least, as what he is shown writing amounts to not much more than a blog. If he writes 800 words a day, 5 days a week that amounts to 4,000 words, and his rate per word would have to be astronomical to keep him and his kids fed and watered.



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The writers of the series have thrown in a few classic clichés in the first episode. There’s the end of the world cell phone coverage or lack of it. There’s the being swindled by the savvy locals, and there’s the saving the bad boy by hiding him from the cops thing. Oh well, perhaps things will get better. It’s not that bad a little show.

The writer in the show is inspired to write about all the things that are happening to him, so he has a ready source of material but my intent is not to make my blog anecdotal in that way. I might mention stuff in passing (like the Rugby World Cup. Yeah! All Blacks!) but in general I want my post to be like a bead necklace with beads on a wire, rather than a single long chain of interrelated links.

Cloisonne beads (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, I will use the same themes repeatedly, such as science or maths or computing, just as a bead necklace generally has similar beads in many places but my intent is that each “bead” will stand alone.

I get messages from WordPress saying that so and so is now following my blog, but I don’t know what that really means. Does it mean that Mr Blobby is avidly waiting for my blog to come out and is disappointed if I am late? Probably not! But thank you for reading the blog, even if you only do it once. I do occasionally go and look at the blogs of those who are mentioned as following me and I may follow some of them.

Start of the Oracle Act (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nevertheless, I write my posts with no specific reader in mind. By that I mean that I don’t visualise a person reading, which is odd, because that means that I send my words off into a vacuum. They must however sound good to me, as I write them, and if something that sounds awkward to me reaches the page, it gets altered.

Actually now I come to think about it, the “me” that writes the words seems to be different, or slightly separated from the “me” that does the reading, like Siamese twins in my head. It’s like a different aspect of myself.

For me the actual process of writing goes like this. I form a sentence or part of a sentence in my head and start to type it. My reading self closely follows this process and notices any typos and mistakes and my writing self corrects them, but these things happen so fast and the two processes are so integrated that it seems seamless.

It’s like an ongoing game of ping pong in my head. One part of my mind says to type the word “the”. Another part tells the fingers what to do. I’m unaware or maybe unconscious of what this part is doing, and I specifically don’t think “move the fingers to the letter t and push”. So far as the conscious part of my mind is concerned it just happens.



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The fingers move and the letters get typed. Another conscious part of my mind follows the letters that appear on the screen and passes off to an unconscious part the instructions to edit and retype. After a person has been writing for a while, it seems to your conscious mind that you think the words onto the screen.

Hmm, I’ve reached just over a 1000 words, so it is time to stop. I’ve shifted from talking about the muse and shifted to the mechanics. Either way the process is, as usual, more complex than it appears at first. I’ll have to think some more about how my words reach the page.



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