Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Taking Aim at Subordinate Enemies of Liberty

Yeh, well, it’s a reasonable target, but there are worse societal ills.

Music company “manufactories” can (and do) produce bad music, Academia Nut Fruitcake Bakeries can (and do) produce bad art, crony capitalism (which is not capitalism at all but a government thumb on the scales of the market) produces economic and social disparities, and a society focusing on privileges instead of actual, real, inherent individual rights produces outright evil.

Better: the government that governs least governs best. Get remote educrats out of public school meddling; get government thumbs off the markets; stop catering to crybullies, etc. Socialism is no threat if the government boot is taken off common citizens’ necks and placed instead on that of real outlaws who violate the actual, inherent rights of others (that would, of course, include socialists of all stripes), instead of government–as now–encouraging outlaws and suppressing citizens expressing/exercising their natural, inherent rights.

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Squishy!

An informal lesson in reading “squishy science” papers touting “associations” and “correlations” would include looking at data sources and the means of obtaining them. For example, this sentence, in a posting of a paper’s abstract (followed by the paper itself) touting some rather scary statements is a red flag:

“Extensive dietary information was collected approximately every 4 years with a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire.”

1. Self-reporting. 2. “Squishy” term: “semiquantitative.” Those two things alone, quite apart from the simple fact that no mechanism for the squishy report “results” was even suggested by the questionable data means that the paper might be interesting, but not all that interesting. It might give someone a place to start making guesses, but there’s nothing that would be as firm as a hypothesis lurking anywhere in this or other “squishy” papers.

There are tons and tons and tons of squishy “peer reviewed” papers out there, hiding the facts of poor data and little real information in statistical manipulation and other squish.

No, I’ll not link the paper. Heck, you can probably find it by searching on the one sentence I quoted, so maybe that’s just petty of me. 😉

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The Continuing Saga of Catrina

Well, arose yesterday A.M. to discover that my Wonder Woman’s cat was apparently nowhere to be found. ALWAYS comes running when food’s put out, but. . . nope. *sigh* Wondered if she had scooted out when one of us had let the dog out, sometime after the last time she had poked her head out in the afternoon the day before.

So, set out the live trap again.

Late yesterday afternoon, she finally came crying at the basement door, of all places–not a place she has ever been known to go before, Who let her down there? Mystery. Aywho, back and sassy. But. . .

I remembered this A.M. that I’d set the live trap out, so went outside under the deck to. . . free the trapped opossum. Yep. Not exactly happy about it (lotsa hissing, as per opossum norm), but happy to be released. Ran off, climbed a tree, and then just sat there glaring at me. Good ‘possum. Gad he/she’s around.

Selling the live trap. Yeh, if Catrina ges out again, it’s on her.

Aside: gave Catrina a bath with a therapeutic shampoo for some hotspots she’s developed, and she now lives in our bathroom. New covered litter box, juuuuusst for her alone. Towel on a shelf where she has decided to sleep/perch–now (she had started sleeping in the liter box!)/ “Sensitive skin & stomach” special food rounds out her opulent confinement. . . and “torture chamber.” (Baths, you know. *heh*) Well, atleast she is sheltered from coming into contact with the fleas we canNOT seem to completely eradicate from Jaxson, our oldest cat (~18 years. Strangely, our lil “rescue kitty”–Pixel–seems immune to fleas–no, seriously! I didn’t get her treated one cycle–long story–and she remained free from them throughout, though I did eventually discover the extra ampule of “flea bane” and realize what had happened. She’s still kinda standoffish toward the other animals, though.).

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Amusing Hook, but LOADS to Just Skip or Skim

No, I’ll not name or link to the series. I have made some comments over on Amazon, but this is a bit. . . more scathing, I suppose I should say, and so I’ll just leave that out for now.

I have now read a series of four books with an interesting sci-fi hook that speaks to me. . . and unfortunately says some things the writer probably didn’t intend to say. The hook: extraterrestrial aliens who are utterly captivated by music from Earth. Unfortunately, all the music referred to in the series is second- or third-rate pop crap. I suspect there are two reasons for this:

  • the writer’s target readership probably has no frame of reference for anything but pop crap
  • the writer probably doesn’t even have any familiarity with really good music at all

And it shows.

So, I just read the books (admission: skimming and skipping parts that seemed like utter crap) mostly just to get those moments of extraterrestrial reaction to music.

Interesting for that, but very glad I didn’t have to pay a dime for any of the books, and spent little time actually reading them.

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402 Pages of Not Quite Wasted Time

Every now and then, I pick up a John Sandford pseudo-mystery (OK, they fit the genre, but are just a bit too predictable, mmK?). Usually, it’s for a similar reason as the one I picked up yesterday. My Wonder Woman had a flat, and, to my eye, it looked like a full-on replacement, despite the massive amount of tread left on the thing (when I got there, it was sitting on the rim and looked like it had been driven on it–not something I can really fault her for, and it wasn’t but for a fairly short distance).

So, I took it on the spare to the closest place I could get a passable replacement tire. Goodyear at WallyWorld a couple of miles away. Didn’t want to drive it far on the spare, because the spare that came with the–used–car is directional, and in the position it was on the car, it was rotating backwards. Yeh, yeh, I know I could have switched it out with another tire, but no. Not a big deal for a short drive, but this is the second time it’s been used in that wheel position, and I just did not want to drive it far.

So, as I said, WallyWorld. I hadn’t prepared myself for the wait, so I picked up a book there. The absolute best on offer at WallyWorld was a John Sandford novel. OK. Read the thing (>i>read most of it while waiting). Not bad but not much of a mystery, really. A few quirky characters did liven the plot a bit, but it was still something of a slog. Just not that good, and filled with things that, had it been a Kindle ebook, I could have “report[ed] content error” on many, many occasions. Putnam really needs better quality editors, IMO. Literate ones, at the very least.

*sigh*

Oh, well, I’ll always have the quirky characters–oh, and the descriptive narrative about the geography, etc. There are those, at least.

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Reading. . . Mostly

“In Defense of Graphic Novels”

I must admit that when I was a (very) young lad, I enjoyed both “graphic novels” and comic books–and viewed them as separate classes of reading. Then again, the “graphic novels” I was exposed to 60 years ago were Classics Illustrated that whetted my appetite for the “uncondensed” versions, so I’m a bit at sea as to the new (well, to me) “graphic novel” genre. Although I long ago left highly-illustrated fiction behind me, I too appreciate the place such works can have in enjoyable reading experiences, and in expanding literacy (if the accompanying text is literately-written). I can even see a place for such works as a reader advances in literacy, just for entertainment’s sake if nothing else. Advancing educational goals through enforced rejection of such pleasure reading isn’t, necessarily–advancing educational goals, that is.

Still, most readers would, IMO, benefit from eventually “graduating” to other reading materials, even though that would not necessarily mean leaving “graphic novels” and comic books behind entirely. Of course, looking at the typical reading matter of a normal “adult” American (social media “memes,” captioned “cute cat pics,” and highly-illustrated–with photos–popular magazines, etc.), it doesn’t seem that many Americans go much beyond comic book reading, anyway.

Sometimes, “educators” vitiate learning by sucking any joy at all out of it.

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The Search is Still On

Although I almost exclusively used the Opera Browser on my computers from the time I discovered it in 1995, I have always used more than one browser, even Me$$y$oft’s Internet Exploder, from time to time. That changed several years ago, when Opera stopped producing what I, at that time, found to be the best browser out there, and began using a Chrome-based rendering engine while dropping many of the features I had come to rely on and adding other “features” that I found unuseful. So, in 2013, the search was on to discover a browser that worked well for me.

Avant Browser has some interesting features (especially native downloading of video files and switching between rendering engines) but lacks many features I r=prefer. I still keep it updated and use it from time to time.

Chrome? Dislike.

Firefox? Dislike. (But was for a long time the only option for TOR browsing, so had to have it *sigh*)

IE and Edge? @gagamaggot

Vivaldi? *meh* Mixed feelings and experiences. Took ’em FAR too long to get anything like fully functional bookmarking, and even now bookmarks and some other features are lacking, IMO.

Yandex Browser: Russian offering based on several different browser technologies (as is the current Opera Browser. . . sorta). Sure, some Russian hacker is probably following me around, though Yandex says they don’t do that, but the thing works really well and has most of the features Opera 12.X had, including robust bookmark management that works well for me, including syncing between my various installs fo the browser in different OSes.

Brave Browser is relatively new and has some very interesting and useful features, but needs a few extensions installed to come up to the Yandex Browser’s functionality. I do like the simple-to-use TOR functionality that is built into the browser. Three basic modes: Normal Browsing, Private Browsing, Private Browsing with TOR. While the latter disables the extensions that I prefer for different functions, it’s still quite useful. Although I surf behind a decent VPN, adding a TOR browser session when following some links where I KNOW I’ll be tracked just makes me smile, slightly.

So, for now, my primary browsers are Yandex and Brave, with occasional uses of Avant Browser, but things remain in flux.

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Just a Wee FYI

Just an FYI: you probably (almost certainly) do not know everything you think you know. (I know I do not, which, perhaps, makes learning new things daily much easier for me in a way.)

No one’s knowledge is exhaustive, even in areas of professional specialization. KNOWING that there is always more “out there, somewhere” to learn about every topic one is aware of (there are many topics that you and I aren’t even aware are areas of knowledge–think on that one, eh? 😉 ) can, if one lets it, encourage one to just keep on learning.

A day w/o learning something new–even, or perhaps especially, when it is something new about something “old,” old knowledge to us–IMO, is a day wasted.

Just sayin’.

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Quick Fix for “Cold Coffee Syndrome” ;-)

Sometimes, when I have yet to reach Optimal Coffee Levels, I set my mug down and. . . forget to sip The Holy Brew while it is at the proper temp. I used to keep an electric cup warmer on my desk for those times when my mind wandered, but my last use of such a thing was ~20 years ago, so. . .

REALY effective “silver bullet” thermos that holds a coupla mugs full of coffee. Pour some into a teensy lil eleven ounce cup and sip. Even if my mind wanders to something task-oriented and I let it cool, it’s usually only a coupla ounces that are cool and easily warmed up to nearly optimal temp with a refreshing from the thermos.

I know, I know: it’d be better to just practice better coffee/memory discipline. *shrugs* Lazy, I guess.

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Light Lunch — Easy-Peasy

1-oz. tortilla chips
1 – habanero pepper, diced
1 – serano pepper, diced
Microwave for 55 seconds

Just the right size for a light lunch, and tasty, indeed.