I Knew That!

And what I knew was… wrong. For values of “wrong” that include the outdated. You see, when I was in grade school, I really, really did not pay attention most of the time. First grade taught me that school was a bit stupid. “Who are Dick and Jane that I should care one whit about their inane activities?” was the basic reaction my six-year-old mind had to the silly idea that I should be taught to read, for example. I was a naturally ego-centric six-year-old, and so I really could not understand why people were trying to “teach” (for values of “teaching” that included crippling my reading with “look-say” crap) me how to do something I already did, less well. That tended to color my response to school right off the bat.

But there were subjects that caught my young mind, even though the methods of presentation were boring or off-putting. Geography is one example. Maps had fascinated me from my earliest recollections of them. Boundaries, places, geographical features: all gripped my imagination. So, when in third grade the subject of the countries of the Americas–North and South–and the States of the Union were presented in class, I ate that stuff up with a spoon.

But I never noticed until just recently that in 1960 Brazil had changed its capital. That’s 52 years of “seeing” (in my mind’s eye) the capital of Brazil as being in the wrong place, with the wrong name.

But that’s OK. I don’t plan on traveling there anyway. *heh* That’s kind of how I view African nations anymore, too. I DGARA anymore what someone’s calling some crappy lil third world country this week or what the latest warlord has declared to be the capital.

Oh, wait:back on topic? OK. The map is not the territory, even with the best maps colored by the most fecund imaginations. And the best maps are incomplete, outdated. Even the county assessor’s aerial survey map of my own house is inaccurate and outdated (two slightly different things: the property line is an approximation and there’ve been notable changes in exterior structure, etc. since the photos were taken).

All models of reality are just that: models, approximations based on a data set which is necessarily less than the reality they represent. What we know from models is even less than the models themselves, because the models are always based on more information than they represent and our grasp of even the models themselves may well be incomplete as well. And reality is a moving target while models, or maps, of reality are at best snapshots.

And that’s part of the problem–not all by any means, but part–with the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism models and true believers’ dogmatic acceptance of the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism’s high priests’ pronouncements from those models. All the models the cult bases its beliefs on are extremely simplistic representations of a few climate factors from a huge, highly complex system, so the models themselves, as has been demonstrated over and over again, are deeply flawed (none of the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism’s models predicting doom and gloom have yet been able to “post-dict” previous era’s climate, for example. If they cannot “post-dict” what temperatures, for example, were in 1900, then they’re essentially useless in predicting future temps).

Just remember whenever someone says “the science is settled” in any area–not just the area claimed by the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism–maps change, and maps are far less complex and open to change than our understanding of the simplest things in scientific endeavors. Read Aristotle. Genius. Wrong. Read Newton. Genius. Wrong. Read Galileo. Genius. Wrong.

Read Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism’s high priests. Dumb. And Dumber. And “wronger” than any of the geniuses who preceded them and whose graves they piss upon with their insistence that their poor models–rain-faded sidewalk chalk sketches of a child’s crayon drawing of a painting of a photo of a shadow of a statue of a man would be a more accurate representation of a man than Warmistas’ models are of climate change–have “settled” the science.

Remember: just because the capital of Brazil was Rio de Janeiro (under two different names) for about 400 years doesn’t mean it still is.

Lowest Common Denominator

IOW: crap. That’s the “standard” of English taught by the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind to those who sup its toxic waste. Take this piece of ungrammatical stupidity taken from an otherwise innocuous piece of fluff about a woman who found a 17 gram piece of a meteorite:

“That gem from outer space was found at the Lotus park where Brenda, her kids and her collie come to [sic] nearly every day.”

*gagamaggot*

Continue reading “Lowest Common Denominator”

“Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make Do, Do Without”

Perhaps it’s because I was in awe of my paternal grandfather’s inventiveness, resourcefulness and all around handiness, but every time I see a dumpster, trash pile, yard sale or just something sticking its head out of the corner in the garage, I begin wondering what I can do with whatever is available, what treasure is hiding in other people’s (or even my own!) trash.

OK, an example from today: for the life of me, I couldn’t find my sunglasses. Not where they belong, so I’d obviously taken them off and laid them down somewhere they don’t belong. Duh. But it was a bright day today and my eyes just do NOT like too much sun. So?

I had an older pair with broken temples. Bummer. One temple broke and I (naturally) repaired it, but when the other temple broke and I didn’t have time to repair it before going out, I simply picked up another pair (cheapos, but surprisingly nice to my eyes). So… repaired the other temple, right? Wrong. I did something… different.

    1. Trimmed both temples to same length–the length of the unbroken piece on the most recently broken side–and sanded the broken/trimmed bits smooth.
    2. Attached a cheap eyeglass retention chord–you know, the kind that you imagine librarians use to hang a pair of reading glasses around their necks. (*heh* Don’t tell my librarian Wonder Woman about that imaginary librarian, mmmK?) It’s adjustable via a bead, so that’s handy. Used some self-curing natural rubber tape to tidy things up.

Hmmm, these things now stay on better than they did when new, and I didn’t have ’em fall off my hat once (the place I normally store sunglasses when inside somewhere or whatnot), cos they hang around my neck. The lil bead also keeps ’em firmly in place when I need them, nice and tight, just right.

Hacking discarded stuff to be better than new, at least for some uses, is just too much fun, you know?