Two items today.
First, I added a few paragraphs to my philosophical speculations at the end of yesterday’s post.
Second, another life hack post (following the one yesterday about phone call etiquette).
Slate, Fortesa Latifi, 7 Jan 2024: Wear the Same Thing Most Days, subtitled “Am I ‘well dressed’? Maybe not. Am I comfortable? You bet!”
Still under the weather; perhaps by Monday I’ll have the energy to get back to ‘work’, i.e. currently the database project. This past week I’ve spent an hour or two a day at the computer, checking my usual sites and doing a blog post, and otherwise lying on the sofa, napping, and reading Tintin books. Two or three a day. I have the complete set, most of them read back in the ’90s, but not in order. I have three left.
Washington Post, Heather Kelly, 25 Sep 2023: The new phone call etiquette: Text first and never leave a voice mail, subtitled “When is it okay to leave voice mails, call multiple times in a row or take a call in public?”
Three items today.
There’s a commonly understood explanation for the long-time strategies of the Republican Party that even some current Republicans seem unaware of, according to Paul Krugman. It’s an explanation we’ve seen many times.
Paul Krugman, NY Times, 4 Jan 2024: Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Politically Obtuse Plutocrats
Items today:
Washington Post, Richard Zoglin, 27 Dec 2023: Opinion | When is this movie really going to start? I’ve been here half an hour.
Under the weather for a couple days now; I finally caught the cold that Y caught end of last week just as we finished in Las Vegas. (Congestion, sniffling, sneezing, some coughing — like the colds I’ve had a couple times a year my entire life. No it’s not COVID!) So a relatively short post today.
Paul Krugman, NY Times, 2 Jan 2024: What the Civil War Was About
(This is a subscriber-only post, but NYT allows subscribers to “share” such articles to non-subscribers 10 times a month, as I’ve done here with its special link for sharing. I also copied the graphic at the top of the post, rather than linking it.)
He does not bury the lede:
Today some more substantial links from the past week or so.
There have been thoughts recently about the very plausibility of mankind living in space, or settling on Mars (let alone traveling to the stars). Just in November, there was a book called A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. The idea is not new in science fiction; the likely unsuitability of planets around other stars for human beings was the central theme of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora in 2015. (My review here.) Other SF writers have acknowledged that visions of interstellar empires — including the variations of Trek and Wars — are likely complete fantasies. They are stories we keep telling ourselves, because they appeal to our nature. We project our local circumstances onto a vast universe we don’t actually understand.
Here’s an essay that suggests there might well be other reasons for going into space. Recall the effusions of William Shatner after his SpaceX trip. Recall the book The Overview Effect by Frank White (now in a fourth edition!) about the “profound shift in worldview they experience when viewing the Earth from space and in space.”
Washington Post, Bena Venkataraman, 26 Dec 2023: Opinion | The best concert of your life might not be on Earth
Posted on Facebook by Geoffrey A. Landis, 15 Dec 2023. I’ll quote, and add line breaks. Though I’m not certain whether this is original with Landis, or something he’s passing along.
People aren’t giving Santa enough credit.
It’s 2024! Let’s see where 2023 left off, based on links I collected over the past week while traveling. Twenty-two items below, including these topics:
Thom Hartmann, AlterNet, 23 Dec 2023: Opinion | Why have Americans embraced so many toxic GOP scams?
This matches my perception:
For this last post of the year, I’ll link several year-end pieces about progress in the world, where most people see only continued doom. (I’ll do a separate post, about progress against my goals in my own life, soon.)
NY Times, Nicholas Kristoff, 30 Dec 2023: This Was a Terrible Year, and Also Maybe the Best One Yet for Humanity
We were away from home for a week, from Saturday the 23rd to Friday the 29th. Here’s a summary.
