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crazy singularity
Wednesday, August 19 2015
I took the dogs for a walk this morning and gathered 77 pounds of firewood from already-cut caches along the Stick Trail. Since that wasn't much wood, I went out immediately afterwards and gathered a couple small limbs from west of the Farm Road, though they only added up to 31 pounds of cut pieces, making today's tally 108 pounds.
Back at the house, I tried eating another fruit of the Bur Cucumber, though this one was a bit more mature than the ones I'd tried in the past, and by now the "hairs" had turned into little hooks, the kind one finds on burdock fruits. One of these lodged in the forest of tastebuds in the center of my tongue and seemed to remain there the rest of the day. If I'm going to eat Bur Cucumbers, apparently I'm going to need to run them through a blender first. Aside from that, the flavor is pleasantly sweet and melonlike.
I was listening to the On Point podcast with Tom Ashbrook, and the subject was software engineering bootcamps for people who hope to quickly transition into software jobs from some other, less-lucrative field. The expense of these courses, which aren't even accredited, can run as high as $20,000, and there's no guarantee that any one person has the temperament to be a software developer. Indeed, several people called in to complain about how hard and frustrating coding can be. If you don't have the focus and drive to punch through the frustration to the elation of success, it's really not the field for you. Personally, I doubt that more than about five percent of the population has the necessary combination of laziness, drive, and obsession. I've never been concerned that coding talents can be comodified and cheapened, especially these days. To work on a modern web application, the software stack is now something of a multi-towered skyscraper. The learning curve is much steeper than it used to be, and it's hard to imagine what path a teenager starting out in the field would take to arrive at professional-level proficiency. Software engineering bootcamps would be helpful, but they'd have to elide a lot of important stuff just to cover the essentials in the time available. That said, I still feel like I could teach a bright student the basics of HTML and Javascript (a tiny but highly-satisfying part of the software stack) in an hour.
I spent far more time today than I should have trying to get my Arduino environment (IDE) to work successfully with Atmega8 microcontrollers configured to run at 8 MHz without a crystal oscillator. The Arduino IDE began supporting only the Atmega8, and you'd think it still would. There are still Atmgea8 cores available from the menu, but none of them are for the 8 MHz/no crystal setup. I found places on the web that described how to set up the IDE to accommodate the 8 MHz/no crystal Atmega8, but none of them were specific to versions of the IDE as advanced as mine (1.6.5). Configuration changes intended for boards.txt and programmers.txt from earlier versions had to be tweaked to come close to working in version 1.6.5, but even then they didn't work. I even asked on the Arduino forum, but nobody with sufficient knowledge replied (though I figured out a few things along the way).
Part of the problem was that I was trying to use the Pony Serial programmer (a sort of hacked-together programmer that has worked great for flashing bootloaders on Atmega168s and 328s). I like Pony Serial because on my ZIF-socketed experimenting board, a switch allows me to go from communicating with an Atmega's serial port (so an Atmega can act like an Arduino) to PonySerial (allowing me to flash a new bootloader). The Pony Serial was working so poorly with Atmgea8s that I tried using one of the USBTiny programmers I bought from China, but they failed for different reasons. It left me wondering if my idea of trying to salvage my old Atmega8s or use as keyboard controllers was too much trouble, especially when Arduino Pro Mini knock-offs can be had for $2.25 from China with free shipping (no, I don't know how that is economically viable).
At some point I took a break to make myself some bean glurp. Last night Gretchen had given me some cucumbers and a zucchini from the cabin where she is cat sitting, and I fried up about two-thirds of a zucchini with the mushrooms and onions before adding the beans. I'm not a big fan of zucchini and squash, but I've had good experiences with them in burritos in the past, so I went with it. The result was uncommonly good, though I'm not entirely certain the zucchini had anything to do with it.
Though I have pretty much everything I need to get started, I'd been putting off work on the basement reflooring project. But I wanted to get started on it before Gretchen returned tomorrow, so today I began moving everything in the master guestroom into the half of Gretchen's library where the carpet will be staying (at least for now). As I did so, Ramona came enthusiastically bounding down the stairs and then, apparently, urinated on the carpet in the library. That, right there, is the reason we can't have nice things. Years ago, Gretchen made the mistake of fostering a bunch of kitten in her library, and since then, there's been a legacy of spots on the carpet where cats and dogs piss and repiss in what amounts to a slow back-and-forth conversation held via urine fragrances. Gretchen had tried removing the worst-offending part of the library carpet in a closet, but the problem had been bigger than that. Though I wasn't happy Ramona had pissed on the carpet, at least she'd done it on the part that is intended to be ripped up. Nevertheless, I did what I could to shame her over it, grabbing her by the forelimbs and trying to get her nose as close to the offending wet spot (still warm to the touch!) as I could. She wanted nothing to do with it, though apparently she had doggy-guilt about it afterwards. People say that doggy guilt is vastly different from human guilt, but all the body language is the same.
As you've probably guessed, I've been obsessed with the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the billionaire numbskull/reality-show star who has been leading the Republican primary field for well over a month. Tonight, it occurred to me that within the Republican party, the force of crazy acts like the force of gravity in a black hole: it overcomes all other forces, causing the whole field to collapse into a "crazy singularity," one where the only force capable of overcoming crazy is yet more crazy. How can the Republican party pull out of this disaster when, individually, the candidates' only avenues of success require them to out-crazy Donald Trump. Somewhere out there, someone has probably formulated the perfect explanation for how this has come to pass. It probably involves the IQ-shrinking effect of Fox News, the logic-robbing power of racial anxiety, and perhaps, somehow, obesity and a lack of exercise. But yeah, we live in interesting times, the kind that would have seemed absurd had they been predicted in fiction.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150819 feedback
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