FailForward @FailForward@qoto.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.
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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
> 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
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🇳🇱
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
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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
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@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.
FailForward
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Eventually Mitch McConnel did find his political spine and declared that Trump did it and that he was responsible. Then in a swift Mitch move he presented his spine as a token of his loyalty to Trump and the party and pleaded not guilty. #impeachment #MitchMcConnell #Trump #trump
FailForward
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I wrote a thing for my friends not on the Fediverse.
imakethingswork.com/blog/socia…
Social Media Alternatives
imakethingswork.com/blog/socia…
Social Media Alternatives
FailForward
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Tradition of removing shoes in home. Green: shoes removed; Blue: shoes not removed.
https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/176735487615/world-map-of-tradition-of-removing-shoes-in-home
# Not everything is bleak, there are simple joys out there
This morning I walked the dog and listened to radio, as I often do. There was this lady in the news fragment on Deutschlandfunk Kultur giving a "bad rapport" (Zeugnis) to Western countries on Corona. In a call-in she enumerated all the bad stuff which (allegedly) went wrong. And I listen in disbelief: all those are just imperfections to me, but all in all we are doing well, dear lady!
The other day, I spoke a friend who tried to convince me that social networks are all bad and he's quitting Facebook. I tried to point out that there's a lot of good stuff happening thanks to social nets too, it's just the small stuff we do not read in the news about, but which is often way more important than the "big" failings of our societies. Again, imperfections all around, but all in all I try to see a positive vector of development in the long-run.
Another friend expects European Union to go down the drain soon, especially because of the economic issues. I repeatedly fail to convince him that of course things are not perfect, but in general there's more robustness and positive developments than all teh negative.
Maybe I am just a naive, overly optimistic bloke somewhere. Dunno. But I can tell you what cheers me up on Saturday morning. Reading the society & lifestyle column in The Guardian, especially the Blind Date section (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/feb/13/blind-date-steph-will). It's so nice to see people opening up about what is positive and good about each other. This is perhaps silly habit of mine, I am well beyond "blind dating" age and stage of life (but who knows!), what I like is to get a weekly dose of positive humanity from there. People genuinely try hard to be good to each other and find joy in each other's presence. **_Not everything is bleak out there! Actually, to the contrary!_**
FailForward
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@kattascha Reaction to a toot https://qoto.org/web/statuses/105716541289609969
Thanks again for your inspiring thoughts.
I am not going to argue with you, I'd rather like to share a thought which I think is relevant for your toot-thread and which intrigues me since a couple of years. First a brief summary of your position:
> Wenn man nicht mit Leuten reden wollte, deren Anhängerschaft einen mit dem Tod bedroht, sah das quasi nach Diskursverweigerung aus.
> Menschen haben ernsthaft diskutiert, ob man quasi schon moralisch verloren hat, weil man sich den „Argumenten“ der AfD nicht stellt. Wahnsinn.
Yours is a perfectly understandable position. But I am not sure whether it's a constructive one. By not engaging and being absent, we let them win by default whatever screwed up game they constructed. I am not sure whether that is a good thing. Certainly it lets them collect some electoral points this way too. And just to clarify, I think morals have nothing to do with this. I care about pragmatic steps here.
> Denkt ruhig mal daran, wenn es darum geht, ob Verschwörungsideologen ein Podium gegeben werden sollte.
So here's a story. In Czecho-slovakian space there is this guy Fedor Gal (https://www.memoryofnations.eu/en/gal-fedor-1945) you probably never heard about, but who's quite a famous person in your neighbouring country. A Jew born in Konzentrazionslager/ghetto Theresienstadt in 1945, later a dissident against communism, scientist, sociologist, one of the leaders of the '89 revolution in Czechoslovakia, later a politician and by every means still a very active public person. This guy is hated by all neonazis of both countries, in 90's he became an anti-symbol for the extreme right and for many he still remains such, even though it's 25+ years since he left active politics.
Now this person's motto is this: **_"We have to keep dialogue open across the fences"_** and he lives up to it. He engages the right wing scene a lot. From public persecution of neo-nazi attacks on Roma minority, through active support to oppressed people and so on. Up to a point, that he patiently went into an e-mail exchange with an active neo-nazi, sustained it for several years and in the end published a book of their conversations with that guy - who still was at that point and probably still remains a skin-head/neo-nazi!. Fedor Gal even went on a tour with that person and engaged on stage in discussions with him for everybody to see. Long story short, the neo-nazi guy got so scared and ashamed that soon he stopped with it and quit.
So what is the point of this story? This person, Fedor Gal does not believe in disengagement with people who actively wish him harm and actually tried to do so many times. He well understands that giving right-extreme scene a platform is a bad thing. At the same time, he's a fighter and will not back off from a conflict. In a way, he's out there to take these extremists down. He clearly recognised that at the core of these people's beliefs is **dehumanisation** of others - extreme _us vs. them_ distinction. He also recognised that **you cannot win by letting yourself to be drawn into their game of us vs. them**. It's their turf, their game, they will win it. His strategy of engagement of these people and groups is based on **putting in contrast his (your) humanity and decency against their brutality and lack of empathy**. People are not emotionally blind. If you show them this contrast, they get it on the emotional level (as far as they are capable of empathy), even if intellectually they have qualms about the persona of Fedor Gal. He's not fighting to convince the right wing guys to stop thinking the BS they do. They are probably lost to us. My understanding is that he's fighting to save the silent majority not to be drawn closer to them and do their bidding, or voting for them. And that is a fight worth fighting. At least if I want to think about myself as an upright and decent human being. For this to work, one needs to let the strategy work again and again over longer periods of time, maybe decades. I consider this to be a very brave way of living.
I also believe that we shall keep dialogue open across the fences. And I try hard to find at least a fraction of Fedor's courage in my life, even though unlike him, I do not actively seek those confrontations, I have more important stuff to do in this stage of my life. But I encourage you and people who listen to you to find the courage to re-engage too.
(from a guy once beaten up by skin-heads in daylight and plain sight on one of the most busy streets of a town somewhere)
> Baby cries are an equivalent of C++ compiler error messages in the real world.
> -- Colleague of mine in a recent all-hands meeting
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
