Head Cold

Saturday, May 3rd, 2025 10:29 pm
flwyd: (intense aztec drummer DNC 2008)
I think the worst thing about having a head cold all week isn't the sinus pressure on my skull, or the way the tip of my nose now feels like sandpaper. It's having spent a whole week breathing through my mouth.

I'm now on the "feeling better, will be ejecting mucus for another month or two" stage. The home test says I don't have covid or influenza. But this is the second time in four months that I've been absolutely hammered by this nastiness. Did the common cold get stronger, or did I just get weaker?

Morse or Less

Monday, March 31st, 2025 09:48 pm
flwyd: Ham radio on cliffs overlooking Keauhou Bay, Hawai'i (parks on the air)
Amateur radio operators are probably the only folks who regularly use Morse code in the 21st Century. Long distance communication today generally happens by voice or digital data; and often voice encoded as data. Militaries stopped training radio operators in Morse code. The final US telegram was sent in 2006; in India it was 2013. Britain's service ended in 1981. Those articles report that in 1920, Western Union charged 5 cents per word (when a nickel was worth something) and the Royal Post Office charged a penny per word, with an exchange rate of about 3 pence per nickel. Back when phone plans didn't just bundle unlimited SMS, it seemed 5 cents (at 2005 value) was the going rate… with space to fit about 20 short words. And anyone with access to the Internet has been able to send thousands of words for free via e-mail for more than three decades.

A couple things keep the dits and dahs of Morse code flowing on the amateur radio airwaves. One is tradition: it's a hobby stereotypically practiced by old dudes, and they had to demonstrate Morse code proficiency to get their license (prior to 2007), so there's a comfortable feeling to it, even if they're not banging out the QSOs with a Vibroplex bug on a Hallicrafters solid-state transmitter.

But it's not just nostalgia that keeps Morse code alive. There are practical advantages to Morse and Continuous Wave. CW puts all the transmitter's power into a narrow bandwidth which is either on or off, and the duration of those emissions create the code pattern. This makes CW ideally suited for low-power long-distance transmissions, also known as "weak signal". While clear-channel AM broadcasters used 50 kilowatts to carry Art Bell's voice across the Great Plains, Art as ham operator W6OBB could have conveyed a message just as far with a one or two watt CW signal. It would've taken a lot longer to relay the caller's story about an alien abduction, though. The AM signal spends half its power on the carrier wave, and the other half is split between two identical modulated waves above and below the carrier frequency, spreading out 5 kilohertz in each direction. The CW signal fits in 100 hertz or so, so it's more like a laser pointer than like a lightbulb.

That narrow bandwidth also means the receiver can listen with a really tight filter. Lower-frequency radio bands often have a lot of static; for an example listen to your AM radio during a summer night with a lot of thunderstorms, or listen to the 75 meter band almost any night of the year. (If you enjoy eavesdropping on colorful characters, the latter offers hours of free entertainment.) The wider the bandwidth of the receiver, the more atmospheric static you'll get in your audio signal and the harder it will be to hear what anyone's saying. But with a CW filter that's only a few hundred hertz wide, you can pick out enough of the dits and dahs to understand the transmission.

Finally, the technology for a CW radio transmitter is about as simple as you can get. A straight key or an iambic paddle closes an electric circuit to send a signal; releasing the lever opens the circuit to stop transmitting. The rest of the circuitry doesn't need to modulate or demodulate the signal, so a student or tinkerer could conceivably start from scratch and end up with a working radio. The cheapest CW transceiver kit I've seen is $15 (but it doesn't have the ability to change frequency). And any mechanism you can think of to complete a circuit can be made into a CW key. (I'm interested in trying the QLF sewing machine pedal, and the nail clipper key should be quite portable.)

I realized the value of CW when I was preparing for a trip to Hawaii. It took a lot of work to pull off ten single-sideband (2.5 kHz bandwidth) contacts in two hours with a 45-watt amplifier, since it's 2500 miles to California. I realized I could probably have lightened my load and still pulled off the activation with a 5 or 10 watt radio and morse code. I even got a light-weight paddle and spent time on the airplane with a Morse code tutor. I didn't end up sending any CW from the island, which is probably just as well… I might have been able to copy at five words per minute.

Last year I set a Parks on the Air goal of making at least one CW contact with each activation. I definitely didn't hit the "every activation" goal (particularly in the fall and winter months when I preferred keeping my gloves on to hit the mic's PTT button), but I did manage to make over 133 CW contacts from more than 20 parks. Sunday evening POTA activations also proved a good opportunity to participate in the weekly K1USN SST slow-speed CW "contest". I was pretty reliant on a decoder app, but I could reliably send at 12 to 15 WPM and a healthy Farnsworth spacing. I can recognize my own WT0RJ callsign by ear with no problem, and CQ SST stands out quite clearly. Visually following the app makes it hard for me to also focus on listening, so recently I've taken to tuning to a station calling CQ, getting their callsign from the app, and then waiting until I can pick out all the characters by ear before responding.

I've also recently gotten a chance to be hands-on with the hardware side. Last year at a hamfest I bought both a Brown Bros CTL-B combined paddle and straight-key crafted in the late 1970s (photo) and a light-weight 3D printed paddle kit made my a local ham. The former doesn't have an output jack, just screw terminals. This February I finally got around to taking it to my office's maker space to wrap three wires around the terminals and inside a 3.5mm jack. The hefty base and hard plastic paddles make for a noticeably different feel when operating. I need to experiment with the screws to find my ideal motion range, but it definitely feels more precise. A few weeks ago I also finally got around to constructing the 3D printed kit. I almost screwed it up by soldering too long a tip on the short wires, but I managed to route everything in the box without impediment. For a base I picked up a very thin sheet of steel which seems to stay with half sitting under a radio, so I can stick the magnetic feet to it and keep the paddle from sliding all over the place while I swipe left and right to call CQ.

Now I've got all the technology, I just need to make time for dedicated practice…
flwyd: (red succulent)
An edited version of this article appeared in this moth's BARC Bark, the Boulder Amateur Radio Club newsletter.

At the beginning of February the Parks on the Air website informed me that I’d made contact with one thousand parks. This milestone is celebrated with the Western Prairie Fringed Orchid Hunter Award, complete with a colorful PDF I can download, print, and frame at my own expense. It could take a position on the wall on my shack next to my Wiggins Acalypha Hunter award for 700 parks, my Oasis Activator award for doing 20 activations at Sawhilll Ponds, and my Rover Warthog award for activating five parks in a single day. There’s only one problem: my shack is whatever picnic table I’ve found to set up my radio gear, so there’s no walls to hang a frame. Maybe I could nail my Howell’s Spectacular Thelypody Hunter award (500 parks) to a tree and hang my end-fed from it.

In the 2010s “gamification” was a hot term in the tech world. Using elements from video games like high scores, streaks, profile avatars, badges, and leveling up tickled the human brain in ways to remain focused on using the app. Anyone who’s stuck with language practice because the Duolingo owl doesn’t want you to lose your streak has experienced the subtle nudge of gamification.

Amateur radio is of course no stranger to gamification. The first DX Century Club (DXCC) members were honored almost 90 years ago, and the hope of getting a few new countries in the log has driven many hams to innovate improvements in their antennas and station design. What’s new with the POTA awards system is the onramp: operators receive a digital award on their profile with just 10 parks, DX awards start at 5 countries, and the parks and QSOs counters go up every time they load their profile, and the page has more than a dozen charts showing progress towards different awards. Progress is tracked almost instantly and with minimal bookkeeping requirements: no need to wonder when your QSL card from Rhode Island will arrive so you can finally claim Worked All States.

When people ask about my hobby, I often answer that I go to a state or national park, set up a ham radio, talk to people, and earn Fake Internet Points. The real reward, of course, is having fun outdoors. But I would be lying to myself if I said the fake internet points weren’t an effective motivator. With the Diamond Activator award (activating 50 parks) and over 5000 QSOs under my belt, I’ve been striving for some of the more challenging awards. The N1CC Activator award is my current target: activate 10 parks on 10 different ham bands. It may just be fake internet points, but it convinced me to experiment with portable 80 meter antennas and get my CW skill into good enough shape that I can work 30 meters. I’ve also made sure to get out to a park at least once each month for the last two years, just in case POTA adds a new award for that. Not bad for a pile of PDFs.
flwyd: Ham radio on cliffs overlooking Keauhou Bay, Hawai'i (parks on the air)
2024 was my second year of frequent participation in Parks on the Air, a ham radio activity that involves setting up a radio and antenna in a state or national park, talking to people around the country and sometimes internationally, and earning fake internet points. I once again managed to do multiple activations each month and hit a few fun milestones.

I operated from 36 parks from 23 counties in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Washington, DC. (I also joined two clubs in Virginia for Field Day.) In addition to over 3,000 contacts with stations in the mainland U.S. and Canada I talked to people in Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Ceuta, Chile, Dominican Republic, Easter Island, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Martinique, Mexico, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, Alaska, Hawaii, and boats and planes over the ocean. I made at least three contacts with every state and DC, and finally got a park-to-park with Rhode Island to fill the 51st slot on Worked All States. I made a park-to-park with every state but North Dakota and every Canadian province but Newfoundland and the territories in the north. And clever county-line positioning allowed me to get a pretty wild number of fake internet points in the West Virginia and Colorado QSO Parties.

On a trip to Hawaii in 2023 I realized the benefit of CW for weak-signal long-distance radio communication, so I set a 2024 goal of getting good enough at Morse code to make at least one CW contact with each POTA outing. I didn't stick to this practice in the latter part of the year, partly because I was worried about how well I could operate a paddle with gloves on, but I did manage 112 POTA CW contacts, plus a handful of contacts from home or work in the K1USN weekly Slow Speed Contest.

CW operating also enabled me to work the 30-meter band, which doesn't allow voice or other wide-band modes. This in turn helped me to get about half way to the POTA N1CC award: 10 parks with contacts on 10 bands. 80 meters has been tricky there: the usually high noise floor means my 45 watt portable station is challenging to hear. I got a shortened vertical antenna for 80m for easy deployment in parks without good trees, but have only really been able to make good contacts when I can loft over a hundred feet of wire into trees. I got some arborist throw weights and proper slick ropes, which has worked a lot better than my original "eye-bolts on fishing line" that was remarkably good at getting tangled. I still use an adjustable vertical when I'm doing a quick activation—throwing a wire antenna over trees and getting it back down again at the end can easily add an hour of "not on the air" time to an activation. But when I've got both time and good trees, the elevated wire makes a significant difference in the number of contacts I can achieve. Shout out to the wide-branch deciduous trees in Arkansas and West Virginia: Colorado's ponderosa pines are a challenge.

Some stats, generally counting "2-fers" as a single contact:
ModeCount
CW112
FM27
SSB2943

BandCount
80m30
40m500
30m12
20m1687
17m223
15m182
12m114
10m304
2m22
70cm8

My StateCount
AR129
CO2267
DC12
KS46
OK59
WV569

UniqueCountMost common
Stations2203N6HU (12)
Parks663US-4559 & US-4572 (8 each)
Frequencies43314.242 (215)
States / provinces / regions85California (235)
CQ Zones144 (1601)
flwyd: (mathnet - to cogitate and to solve)
At the end of December I read Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin. Grandin is one of the most famous people with autism, or perhaps it would be better to say that she's one of the people most well-known for having autism. Grandin thinks in pictures, and Visual Thinking draws on her own mind, her experience working with others, and psychological research to talk about three different types of thinking.
  • Object visual thinking involves mental images of specific things or scenes. Thinking about airplanes involves recalling mental images of specific airplanes the person has seen, in person or in a photograph: perhaps a Boeing 737 or a Cessna 182. Temple Grandin is an object visual thinker, and famously designs livestock handling facilities by visualizing what an animal would see from a particular location.
  • Visual-spatial thinking involves thinking in relations, abstractions, and patterns. Thinking about airplanes might involve thinking about the general structure of an airplane—the fuselage connects to wings, the cockpit, tail, etc.—without thinking about any specific plane.
  • Verbal thinking involves words and sequences rather than images. Thinking about airplanes might involve the process of flight: boarding, taxiing, acceleration on the runway, liftoff, and so on.

The book's focus is on visual thinkers, people whose main mode of thought is either object-visual thinking or visual-spatial thinking, particularly the former. People on the autism spectrum are often visual thinkers, though not all visual thinkers are autistic or vice versa and neither has a bright-line diagnostic. As an autistic child, Temple Grandin didn't learn to speak until later than many children, and she struggled in many classes in school because the material was presented for verbal thinkers and folks who could do abstract reasoning. She talks about finally connecting with coursework that made sense to her when she got to shop class, which is about working with physical objects. Another key educational experience was going to a boarding school which involved chores like caring for animals; lacking language, animals are naturally visual thinkers.

Grandin talks about the kinds of work that the three types of thinkers do well. You'll often find object visual thinkers in roles that require hands-on work: mechanics, machinists, drafters, builders, equipment operators, repair people. They're excellent at troubleshooting machinery, and they're able to tinker and build things with whatever supplies may be at hand. Visual-spatial thinkers are often drawn to engineering, mathematics, and computers; they design complex systems and find patterns in the world. Verbal thinkers are, naturally, drawn to work that's focused on words or sequential thinking. Lawyers, politicians, authors, and journalists are often verbal thinkers, and project managers can apply sequential thinking to make sure things happen on time. Grandin likes to talk about how the two types of visual thinkers are complimentary when designing something. Abstract visual thinkers can do all the modeling and calculations to ensure a factory building will be sturdy and that the machinery runs reliably. But a factory designed only by abstract thinkers likely won't run very effectively because they tend to overlook problems in the specific details of things work on the factory floor: the awkward movements a worker needs to do at the assembly line, or poor lighting of a workbench because something's blocking the lamps. Visual-spatial thinkers can make great electrical engineers, but you might want an object visualizer as an electrician. In the software space you might want an object visual thinker for a UI designer, a visual-spatial thinker writing code, and a verbal thinker as product manager, figuring out the user journeys the system will support.

A lot of the book talks about how modern American society is letting object visual thinkers down. A lot of schooling is designed for verbal or abstract thinking, and object visualizers struggle. Grandin reports that object visual thinkers often have a very difficult time with algebra, which they find too abstract and this challenge prevents many people from graduating from high school. However, many of these same people excel at geometry and trigonometry because their visual cortex can make sense of the relationships. "Let students take trigonometry if they fail algebra" might sound weird to folks used to the traditional progression of high school, but it might result in having a lot more Americans who are good at math, at least some parts of it. Grandin highlights George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act for making this problem worse: schools are graded and funded based on students' standardized test scores, so the incentive is to focus instruction on what will be tested. There's no standardized test that gives subjects a pile of lumber and a box of tools and asks them to assemble a chair, so when budget cuts come, classes like shop and music get taken away. Colleges and universities tend to make things even more abstract and more verbal, and the availability of trade schools, apprenticeships, and other hands-on education has been dwindling. Companies often have a college degree requirement, not realizing they may be cutting object visualizers out of the employment pool. Grandin decries that the result is an America where we're losing the ability to fix things.

This has political implications, too. (Here I'm building on Temple Grandin's foundation, she doesn't frame the book this way.) There are fewer narratives in American politics stronger than the middle class dream of success. After World War II, a man with no education beyond high school could get a good-paying job as a factory worker, a miner, an auto mechanic, doing appliance repair, or many other roles that object visual thinkers do well. These jobs offered the chance to own a home, raise a family, and enjoy leisure time; a combination that was uncommon for their parents' generation. As the 20th Century drew to a close, and accelerating in the 21st Century, the American economy shifted strongly to jobs that reward abstract or verbal thinking. Globalization sent a lot of the manufacturing jobs to lower-cost countries while domestic production became increasingly automated. (Fun fact: the U.S. is still the world's leading manufacturer, even though we employ a fraction of the manufacturing workforce we once did: American manufacturing is mostly done by machines.) Computers and the Internet gave powerful tools to abstract and verbal thinkers who are able to thrive in a service and information economy. High-tech manufacturing also made hands-on work more difficult: in the 1960s and '70s, buying a Heathkit stereo system and assembling it yourself could save significant money and teach you something useful at the same time, and you could easily fix it if a component failed. Today with high-tech automated assembly and microprocessors running everything, the cost to pay someone to fix a damaged Sonos speaker system is probably higher than the price of buying a new one. Starting in 2015, America saw Donald Trump's messaging resonate with older voters who work in these object visualizing jobs, and especially among voters who identify with such work that's been in decline like coal mining and assembly lines. Should it be any surprise in 2024 that Harris outperformed Trump by 13 points among college-educated voters, but Trump was up 24 points among men without a college degree? Millennials living in their parents' basements and playing video games all day was something of a running joke in the late aughts, but that also describes visual thinkers who've been left out of the modern American social structure and have grown to resent folks who were able to follow the abstract and verbal path through college and the modern hands-off economy.

I'd watched Temple Grandin talk about this book at Google, so I was curious how the ideas of a highly visual thinker would come across in a book, a naturally verbal and sequential medium. At times reading the book felt like listening to Temple Grandin give a talk; she often communicates in specific anecdotes, and related stories recur throughout the book. One of the big themes of the book is how people with different thinking styles can collaborate, and in the book she gives praise to her editor who's able to apply strong verbal thinking to organize the scattered notes and fragments that Temple gives her. This is certainly helpful in making this information about visual thinking accessible to verbal thinkers and readers. I found it interesting, though, that a book which is all about thinking in images and spatial relationships contains 400 pages of words and no photographs, illustrations, or diagrams. As a visual-spatial thinker, I was hoping to see some kind of 2D representation of how a visual thinker might operate. I wonder how many visual thinkers would benefit from learning this information, but get turned off by a book that's nothing but words.

I think I first heard about visual-spatial thinking, as distinct from object visualizing, from a previous Temple Grandin talk. I've considered myself on the autism spectrum for over 20 years, since I learned about Asperger's syndrome. When I heard Temple Grandin explain how her brain works I said "that's definitely not how mine works." While I can build intricate and elegant software systems, I'm perennially bad at building physical things. Cognitive tasks like mentally rotating a cube are challenging for me, but I can visualize a map of the whole world or specific areas, and at talent shows I like to recite every country in the world in geographic order. Unlike many kids with autism I didn't have any trouble learning language, and I always read above grade level. But I think my language use shows signs of spatial and abstract thinking: I've always loved puns, which feel to me like I'm demonstrating a multi-dimensional linkage between words that aren't present in the normal linear version. As a kid I often focused on the literal meaning of a set of words, much to the consternation of verbal thinkers who would say "you know what I mean!" (I still do this as an adult sometimes, but I have four decades of building a database of what people actually mean when they say something that a program would interpret differently.) I also tend to be very long-winded: an excellent verbal thinker can convey an idea without using a lot of words, while I tend to say or write down every sentence that comes to my mind related to a topic. Someone might mention a topic at lunch and I'll spend three minutes talking about all the things I learned from Wikipedia that are tangentially related. This is a bit like reading a map out loud: the river we were talking about touches another river, so let's row up stream and see where that one goes.

It's important for people creating tools and products to design with the different modes of thinking in mind. Much as a product that was designed and tested entirely by right-handed people is likely to be awkward for lefties, a product or process that was designed around the way verbal thinkers operate is likely to be frustrating to visual thinkers. Google Maps is an interesting example here. At the core, the data is inherently spatial: where is everything? But there are ways to expose that data that fit different thinking patterns. If someone wants directions from one place to another, Maps could show a path on a map and instructions like "take 6th Avenue to Broadway and turn south, then turn west on Alameda." This is great for spatial thinkers like me; I might ignore the written instructions entirely and just look at the lines on the map; if I take a different turn I can still reach the destination because I've formed a mental model of the space between here and there. Verbal thinkers might focus on the step-by-step instructions, but when they come to each intersection they'll have to figure out "which way is south?" So instead of cardinal directions, let's use left and right turns. Object visualizers still might have trouble, though: the map is an abstract set of lines and rectangles that can be hard to turn into 3D space, and the turn-by-turn instructions are a bunch of street names and numbers that need to be kept in order: "do I turn on Alameda before Broadway, or is it the other way?" So Google Maps recently added navigation by landmarks: "turn right after the McDonalds" and "turn left at the second traffic light." To get even more context, object visualizers can drop into Street View and see what all the buildings look like at an intersection. This multi-modal approach to directions is a big win over paper maps, when everyone but the spatial thinkers was faced with a daunting puzzle. The old stereotype of a woman in the passenger seat complaining that the man in the driver's seat didn't pull over and ask for directions might have been a conflict between verbal and visual thinking…

I was pleased to learn that object visual thinkers do share a trait with visual-spatial thinkers: we organize things by keeping track of their physical location. It might look like a random pile of papers on a desk to a verbal thinker, but ask a visual thinker to retrieve a particular document and they can probably find it quickly. But if a verbal thinker comes in and tries to be helpful by organizing all the papers into an efficient filing system the visual thinker will be unable to find anything, because it's not where they last put it. These two organization approaches are "piling" and "filing." My coworkers are often confused about how I can manage having 20 browser windows open with 50+ tabs in each. I find it quite easy: each window has a loosely-related theme, and I remember where on the desktop each window sits. When my workstation switched to Wayland, Chrome was unable to restore windows to their original locations when it opened and I was completely flustered; I had to spend 20 minutes a week figuring out which window was which and moving them back to their original location. On the other hand, I always wonder how someone who's only got one browser window open can keep track of what they were working on :-)
flwyd: (dogcow moof!)
The 80s kid in me thinks it's pretty weird that I spent more than half an hour downloading a LEGO Super Mario app, connecting to Luigi and Princess Peach via Bluetooth, and then installing software updates on large lego figures. By the time this was done, my nephew had lost interest in this activity.

Puts on grumpy old man pants When I was a kid, you could have set up a Nintendo and beat the first level of Super Mario Brothers in that half hour. Or you could've built half a lego castle.
flwyd: (1895 USA map)
Hey, I've got a favor to ask you. Please call your Member of Congress and ask them to support including the Energy Permitting Reform Act in the budget continuing resolution. This legislation is moving fast, so please make the call this weekend. I hear that House Democrats particularly need to hear from constituents about this. If you don't have Congress on speed-dial you can use the tool at https://cclusa.org/take-action. It will take approximately one or two minutes total.


Background: Democrats passed the biggest climate bill in U.S. history, the Inflation Reduction Act, this congress. But only about 20% of the IRA's potential benefits will be realized if we can't build clean energy projects and connect them to the U.S. electric grid faster. It currently takes federal agencies an average of 4.5 years to complete environmental impact assessments for large energy projects. This timeline can be sped up without negatively impacting quality: we want the same decisions to be reached—yes to good projects and no to bad projects—faster. This July, the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee introduced a bipartisan bill to address some of the problems which unnecessarily delay energy project; this bill passed through committee on a 15 to 4 vote and has broad support in the Senate. With a divided Congress the bill is naturally a compromise, and does have some provisions about fossil fuel permitting. This led many environmental groups to reflexively oppose the bill when it was announced. However, more than 95% of projects waiting to be built are clean energy projects, so if we make the process for permitting (or rejecting) all projects faster, clean energy will outcompete and replace fossil fuel energy. Careful modeling indicates that the Energy Permitting Reform Act will have between a modest climate benefit and a large climate benefit by 2050, the typical target date for net-zero emissions. Additionally, many of the fossil fuel pieces of the bill are things that the Trump administration is likely to do anyway, so please encourage your Democratic House members to support this bill, rather than getting the fossil fuel parts without the clean energy parts next year.
flwyd: Colorado I voted sticker (I voted Colorado)
It’s poetic that U.S. elections happen in the autumn: the civic work we did throughout the year gets harvested, the campaign leaflets are raked up, and the promises of the old year are composted to provide fertile soil for the policies of the new year. Following Celtic traditions, many Neopagans see Halloween/Samhain as the time when the king dies, to be born once again on the winter solstice. In the American political calendar, the time between the two is the lame duck session, when the old symbols of The People’s Will harvest the last of their legislative crops before this political will is reborn, sometimes into the same physical body and sometimes into a new human who shall carry the charge.

As Joe Biden's hero's journey draws to a close America begins a journey through the underworld. If we support each other through the time of darkness we will emerge we will emerge stronger, ready to till the fields of democracy once again.
flwyd: (daemon tux hexley)
It's October, which means I'm now allowing myself to start scheming about Advent of Code 2024. The last four years I've taken it as an opportunity to learn a new language. This year for some reason I'm inspired to learn a stack-oriented language, so I've been playing with PostScript. The world has generally moved on from PostScript: it gave birth to the wildly-popular PDF format without quite as much "Anything goes in this Turing-complete document presentation language," and even the latest version of macOS Preview.app can't read PostScript files. But if you set aside the fact that a majority of the language builtins are designed for using graphics, text, fonts, and printer hardware, it's a pretty slick language. You've basically got two things available: a stack of data and operands and a stack of dictionaries for dynamic name lookup. Both the programmer and the computer use basically the same model for evaluating code: read a token; if it's data then push it on the stack, if it's executable then run it, reading from the operator stack and writing to the same stack.

Programming language tutorials, particularly for functional languages, have a strong affinity for calculating the n'th Fibonacci number, but let's generate the whole sequence by just calling the same "function" over and over again (== is "print the source representation of the object on top of the stack and GS> is the Ghostscript prompt):
GS> /fib { 2 copy add } bind def
GS> [ 1 1 fib fib fib fib ] ==
[1 1 2 3 5 8]
GS> [ 1 1 15 { fib } repeat ] ==
[1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597]

Stack-based languages can have pretty simple syntax rules. That [ ] array syntax isn't "parse elements between the brackets as an array." Instead, the [ operator pushes a mark onto the stack and the ] operator builds an array with all the items on the stack until the first mark. Everything between the brackets is just normal PostScript code being executed on the stack. The following code builds an array of increasingly nested empty arrays by copying the whole array so far:
GS> [ 5 { counttomark [ exch 1 add copy pop ] } repeat ] ==
[[] [[]] [[] [[]]] [[] [[]] [[] [[]]]] [[] [[]] [[] [[]]] [[] [[]] [[] [[]]]]]]
% Or if you prefer some non-empty values to help read
GS> [ 42 5 { counttomark [ exch 1 add copy pop ] } repeat ] ==
[42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]] [42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]]] [42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]] [42 [42] [42 [42]] [42 [42] [42 [42]]]]]]

I've heard that some functional programming devotees might think of the non-negative numbers as a sequence of nested empty lists…

In PostScript, procedures are just arrays with the executable bit set, and you can construct and manipulate them as arrays. {} is syntax for an executable array, [] is syntax for a regular array, and cvx converts its operand to executable:
GS> { (hello world\n) print } exec
hello world
GS> % same thing:
[(hello world\n) (print) cvx] cvx exec
hello world

Since a procedure is just a mutable array of things to do, you can replace things in that array. Here's a self-modifying procedure that increments the first value inside itself, similar to a static int in a function in C:
GS> /selfmod { 1 (caller #) print == currentdict /selfmod get dup 0 get 1 add 0 exch put } bind def
GS> selfmod
caller #1
GS> selfmod
caller #2
GS> selfmod
caller #3

Page 115 of Thinking in PostScript defines a procedure by name including some initialization code; it then redefines itself without the initialization code the first time it's run. (The fact that the book is PDF file instead of a PostScript one says something indicative about the status of PostScript in the modern world.)

While PostScript has a couple hundred operators that are part of the language, a lot of those are for doing things like drawing on the page and selecting fonts. The parts of the "standard library" for working with strings and arrays is pretty spartan: even concatstrings is a Ghostscript addition, and I think people copy/pasted their own concatenation function all over the place for years. Since my Advent of Code interests don't include "Let's re-implement parsing a variable-width text file into fixed-size mutable strings each night," I've been getting some practice with the language by writing some core library functions that I'm certain will be used frequently.

I was about to work on the functional programming standbys like map and reduce, but I realized that with arrays constructed by "run all the code between brackets, then move everything from the stack between those brackets into an array" that having a separate function for map would just be extra noise and the basic iteration operator does the trick. Here's the PostScript equivalent of myarray.map { x -> x + 1 } and mydict.mapValues { i -> x * x }.
% Add 1 to each element of an array:
[ myarray { 1 add } forall ]
% Create a dictionary with the same keys as mydict, but square the values:
<< mydict { dup mul } forall >>

reduce (or fold depending on your dialect) is similarly straightforward if you supply with the accumulator rather than using the first array value. Here's myarray.reduce(0) { x, acc -> x + acc } (sum) and an implementation of myarray.all { x -> x % 2 == 0 } (are all items are even?).
0 myarray { add } forall
true myarray { 2 mod 0 eq and } forall

None of these need special handling for empty collections. They also work to iterate through bytes of a string (though there doesn't seem to be a short way to construct a string from an array of bytes). The all implementation can become an any by switching true to false and and to or. all becomes none by adding not before and. Short-circuiting can be added with dup { exit } if after the and/or.
flwyd: (McCain Palin Abe Maude Simpsons)
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women
flwyd: (farts sign - Norway)
My employer-sponsored health plan has a "specialty pharmacy" insurance which is separate from the ordinary pharmacy benefits. Painkillers for surgery post-op, antibiotics when you're sick, prescription NSAIDs for chronic inflammatory disease, and all those other medicines that come in an orange plastic container are reliably dispensed by my local King Soopers pharmacy with what I would describe as a high level of competency. Other than "we haven't filled it yet, can you come back in an hour" I haven't had any problems acquiring or paying for any of these medications for fifteen years.

The "biologic" disease-modifying drug I take for psoriatic arthritis, on the other hand, is considered a "specialty medication" which means it's paid for by CVS Specialty Insurance, filled and delivered by CVS Specialty Pharmacy, and picked up at my local CVS Pharmacy. Despite all having the word "CVS" in the name, as far as I can tell they're three separate entities who are almost incapable of coordinating with each other.

Drug manufacturers have learned that they can charge a lot of money for biologics. But if they charge too much money, patients with a 10% copay will balk at the price, avoid filling the prescription, and the drug company will miss out on the other 90% that would've been paid by insurance. So they came up with a way to hack the U.S. health payment system: offer patients a "co-pay assistance" card, which is basically a persistent coupon lowering your out-of-pocket costs to almost nothing. Patients will then keep filling the prescription because it's basically free, leading to something of a principal–agent problem where the person making buying decisions has no incentive to consider the cost of the item. My employer ends up footing the bill, but I'm only annoyed with this situation in principle: in practice I get free drugs. (My employer benefits too, because I was not very productive when my symptoms were causing problems and I wasn't taking the drugs.)

In late January or so of this year, I received notification that starting April 1st, our CVS Specialty Insurance plan would no longer cover Humira—the name-brand adalimumab—and would instead be covering Hyrimoz, a cheaper generic adalimumab. This seemed like a bit of an unfair move, since employees can only change decisions about health care plans near the end of the year, but as a fan of generic medicines this seems like a sensible choice. However, although this change was announced in January so people could start worrying about it, we couldn't actually take any action like getting a doctor to change prescriptions for more than a month. Come mid-March I called CVS Specialty Pharmacy to fill my new Hyrimoz prescription, but was told that since CVS Specialty Insurance didn't cover it until April 1st I couldn't actually place an order until April (including "place an order in March for April delivery"). This was rather inconvenient, since I was leaving town for two weeks starting April 1st and didn't want to spent my road trip vacation arguing with pharmacy customer service people when things would eventually go awry. The customer service rep did inform me that I could set up the co-pay assistance card in advance, though. After several attempts to use the drug manufacturer's website that had some technical hot mess I can't recall, I finally got a PDF that had two sets of discount code numbers on it, one "for NDC starting with 61314" and one "for NDC starting with 83457." As a health insurance policy holder I still have no idea what NDC stands for, nor how I would figure out which of those two apply to me. I relayed this to the person at CVS Specialty Pharmacy who suggested she take down both sets of numbers and put them both in their system so they could figure it out once the prescription actually gets filled.

Come April I was able to order a 3-month supply of Hyrimoz, plus a bag of alcohol wipes and a sharps container. I was somewhat surprised that the medication was delivered without much issue, given my prior experience of organizational incompetence ordering Humira. When I tried to pick everything up, though, the retail CVS Pharmacy folks were getting some indication in their system that they shouldn't hand over the sharps container and alcohol swabs, so I walked away with a couple thousand dollars of medicine and not ten dollars worth of common medical supplies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (It only took a day or two for them to realize I could take a sharps container to dispose of the future medical waste they handed me the previous day.)

A few weeks later, someone from CVS Specialty Pharmacy billing department called and informed me that I still hadn't paid my copay for that order. I was surprised, since I'd given them all the information on the card which claimed my copay would be zero dollars. I think we discovered that there wasn't a card on file, so I gave both sets of numbers again and the rep said she would rebill. Problem solved? Hardly. I don't recall the exact timeline, but when I attempted to refill the prescription in the early summer I discovered it was on hold because the prior order hadn't been paid. So I called CVS Specialty Pharmacy; we went through the numbers again, and she determined that based on the diagnostic code from CVS Specialty Insurance the code for the wrong NDC was in their system and she didn't have the other code, so I re-provided all the digits. After some time on hold she confirmed the order had been rebilled.

So imagine my surprise this weekend when I was sorting through an accumulated pile of mail and discovered that the charge from April had been sent to collections. I called CVS Specialty Pharmacy this morning, and pointed out they had a discount card on file. The representative said they would rescind the bill from collections and rebill insurance. Will CVS manage to pay itself this time? Who knows! The two companies seem to share the same name but otherwise lack the ability to communicate effectively.

Payment aside, order fulfillment and delivery is also a comedy of errors. In early September I received a text message from CVS Specialty Pharmacy that said my prescription was ready to be refilled, but when I went to CVS Specialty Pharmacy's website it said I couldn't refill for another week and a half, and once that time passed I could only schedule delivery for another week and a half later. When I arrived at the retail CVS Pharmacy I was handed a large paper bag that was wet and soggy on the bottom. This contained a cold bag with three ice packs and a single box of medicine, 90 alcohol swabs, and three sharps containers. It's unclear to me whether the Specialty side (which distributes this temperature-controlled medication from a warehouse somewhere) or the retail side (which keeps medicine in the refrigerator until I pick it up) were the ones who decided to keep sharps containers and alcohol swabs should be kept refrigerated, but I'm quite glad I didn't pick this one up on a bicycle commute day because that bag was a wet mess. More importantly, I was rather miffed at CVS Specialty for taking my "Please send me three months worth of medicine, alcohol swabs, and a sharps container" into one month of medicine, a year's worth of sharps disposal, and three years worth of swabs. The order sheet says "2 ml" of Hyrimoz, and each box contains two 0.4 ml pens, so it would take two and a half boxes to match two milliliters of medicine; I only got 0.8. I attempted to call CVS Pharmacy retail about this problem, but every attempt to use their phone tree's "Leave a voicemail and we will call you back" feature resulted in the computer voice saying they were sorry. So I stopped by the pharmacy in person to tell them (1) file a ticket to get your phone system fixed and (2) you didn't give me my whole order. The pharmacist explained that they could view and dispense CVS Specialty Pharmacy orders but couldn't do anything else like investigate why it was wrong, so she gave me the phone number for Specialty. You guys are both CVS Pharmacies, why can't your computers talk to each other? Another call to the other CVS turned up the fact that two prescriptions, one for a one-month supply and one for a three-month supply, were both in the computer system, and the system automatically selected the first and billed insurance for it. She said she put a note on my record to do the three-month supply next time, and assured me that I would be able to place that order in October. I've a rather sneaking suspicion that they'll manage to fumble something again and I'll have to take another adventure through their customer support lines to convince their computer that I'm eligible for more drugs before December. (I discovered my previous order sheet this evening which says it was filled for 6 ml, which would be a 10 week supply rather than a 6 week supply. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that CVS Specialty can't even get arithmetic right.)

I wonder if it's occurred to the folks who run my company's benefit plan that I'm not doing anything productive for the company if I spend half a day getting derailed by systematic incompetency every few months.
flwyd: (playa surface)
Between a sudden December in Hawaii, a two-week road trip for the eclipse, and two weeks lobbying about climate change and running around the hills of West Virginia, I used up all my vacation this year and could not go to Burning Man. One consequence of this decision is that this has been probably my most laid-back non-pandemic August since 2007. "I think I'm going to screw around on the Internet this evening" feels almost transgressive when I'm used to spending a week and a half between Dragonfest and Burning Man working on a long list of things that need to be packed, and another long list of things that need to be found and then packed. (Last year I realized I had no almost no unaccounted weekends for four months.)

After my first burn in 2004 I said "That was fun, but I don't know if I'll do it every year. But I'm going to make sure that if I don't go to Burning Man, I'll do something else cool instead." Usually the other-cool thing has been on or around the same week (visiting Iceland, getting married, taking photos of DNC protests, going to Norway…), so it's extra weird having already done the cool thing, and having burn week as just an ordinary time. I played a great softball game on Tuesday, and got a blinky lights, bicycles, costumes, and electronic music experience tonight with Boulder's Happy Thursday cruiser ride.

It's been so low-key that I didn't decide what I'm doing Labor Day weekend until a couple days ago. For months I'd been considering watching a different giant wooden man get set on fire, with Zozobra marking his hundredth anniversary in Santa Fe. I wasn't excited about how the logistics were looking, and have some things going on next week that would be awkward if I was fighting COVID after hanging out with 40,000 people.

This means instead I get to spend Saturday sitting on the Gilpin/Clear Creek county line so I can double my fake Internet points for the Colorado QSO Party, a ham radio event where Colorado stations try to contact other counties plus other states and outside hams try to contact as many Colorado counties and stations as they can. I got over 40,000 points by operating from a triple-county line in West Virginia in June; I'll see if I can beat that with more power and more operating time on just a double-line. In 2021 I hung out in the NCAR parking lot and then went for a hike with my handheld and later received a certificate for first place in the Single-operator portable QRP power category with a whopping score of 36. With high enough cardinality, everyone can be a winner.

I've heard that this year's Burning Man weather has been quite pleasant, after last year's adventure with rain and mud and 2022's excessive heat and dust storms. I would've been bummed to miss the paradise built in mud last year, but I'm feeling pretty okay with missing out this year. And as we say, next year was better.
flwyd: (smoochie sunset)
… the void cat stares back at you.

On the first weekend of last July we got Pearl from the Boulder Humane Society. A slim gray cat with splotches of white and dull orange, she might camouflage well in a boulderfield. They told us she'd probably had a litter of kittens, and had been sent from Texas, which apparently is the source of a lot of shelter cats. Yet another teen mother fleeing Texas for Colorado for better reproductive health care. A teen in cat years, she was long and lanky, with an unusual running gait of paws crossing in front of each other. It took some time to get her comfortable with close human contact.

As an adult Pearl is still long, but looks less like a teenager trying to grow into her own body. She's comfortable with her two humans, but on her terms: she doesn't like to be picked up and hardly ever sits on a lap, though she often sleeps next to us in the bed. A cat with strong boundaries, like Kelly's first cat Joan. She rarely meows. She's a clever problem solver and a determined huntress: she caught four mice in two days this winter. She'll do incredible acrobatic maneuvers to catch a hair tie, and after defeating it in fierce battle she may carry it to her food bowl before eating a bit. This cat is not food motivated, she's hunt motivated.

We've long thought that Pearl would do well with a kitten adopted sibling as a partner in play. Humans can only shoot so many hair ties before they need to go to work or keep fussing with a laptop. Two cats can chase each other up and down the hall any time of day or night. We needed to wait for the right time though, "We'll be out of town for two weeks later this month" isn't good "introduce a new cat" timing. As coincidence would have it, "the first weekend of July" is apparently cat acquisition time around here. Maybe it's because the 4-day weekend provides enough time to clean enough of the house that a cat's not immediately going to get into object-oriented trouble.

The first kitten we played with was very into us, determined to play, fine with being held, and even hung out in my lap despite all the excitement. Black with a white toe, a white patch on her belly, and two white whiskers like a Fu Manchu beard. It seems odd to decide to live with a mammal for more than a decade after just half an hour of play, but she's worked out well so far. She didn't make much noise at the shelter but boy howdy did she holler whenever we left the room as she was adjusting to the house. She's the least hesitant cat when exploring new spaces that I've ever seen: as soon as she can break through the threshold she's never passed before she makes a beeline for who knows where, only stopping to sniff around once she's well beyond familiar territory. Our catsitter dubbed her Little Miss Runs-Like-Water." Time cycles are shorter for juvenile mammals and she can quickly transition from chase-every-toy-around-the-room to curl-up-and-purr-on-your-feet. During the first night her territory expanded from the closet to the bedroom she tried to nurse my beard, longing for the mother cat she didn't have. She realized the beard won't bear milk, but she still goes after my armpits. Curling up and purring on my chest while I lie in bed is absolutely adorable, though.

I've long thought that philosophers would make good cat names. This rambunctious kitten didn't seem like a Lao Zi, but Nietzsche seemed like an excellent choice for a void cat intent on fearlessly seeking discoveries in a world much different than what her parents knew.

Integration of the cats took a couple weeks. Pearl isn't very food-motivated, so attracting her to one side of a baby gate with treats wasn't a reliable strategy. Nietzsche's first several adventures outside the bedroom featured a lot of exploring while Pearl watched with suspicion and disapproval. They would tolerate each other's presence for awhile, then Nietzsche would do something rambunctious like jump towards her, Pearl would start bapping, and hissing would ensue; back to the bedroom. Wrangling cats took up most of the energy of the evening, and would've been completely overwhelming without two people.

Over the last week they've finally warmed to each other. There's still a lot of wrestling and bapping, but it seems to be claws-free and neither cat seems particularly upset about it. Nietzsche still has no fear and will charge Pearl in surprise, Pearl will strike back, Nietzsche adopts a submissive position, they reach an agreement, then Nietzsche withdraws and plans her next move. They'll both chase each other and can happily relax within a few feet of each other. They've got some time before they start snuggling each other, but there was some motherly forehead licking last night.

So now we've got a cat with strong boundaries and a cat that loves to break on through to the other side. A watcher cat and a doer cat. An independent cat and a lap cat. A cat that will chase any toy and a cat that wants the hair ties to fly just so. We've got a yin cat and a yang cat.
flwyd: (1895 USA map)
… if it was invented anywhere else they would've called it a teethbrush.


Like the British, dental structure and oral hygiene seems to have improved significantly in the last few generations. The person who told that joke was the only person I saw in West Virginia born after World War II and with visibly missing teeth, but he was explaining how a whitewater rafting paddle can cause dental damage.

Also breaking with stereotypes, I drove nearly 1,000 miles in West Virginia and through Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and saw fewer than a dozen Trump yard signs, flags, or bumper stickers. On a 2,000 mile trip through Kansas, Oklahoma, and Akransas in April I could count the number of Trump memorabilia on one hand, including a "Let's Go Brandon" bumper sticker and the "Thank you Trump" semi trailer parked on the north side of I-70 in Eastern Colorado. This is way down from what I saw in Kansas and Arkansas in 2022, and nobody seems to even be flying FJB flags. I don't know what conclusions to draw from this observation, and I certainly don't think Biden's going to win much of the Mississippi basin. But maybe folks in red states are just not as into Trump as they were eight years ago. They've got other things on their mind.

A friend said I'd see Confederate flags in West Virginia. I said that would be incredibly ironic; don't these people know their history? I think the only one I saw was just across the border from Virginia. Towns with a big outdoor recreation economy are now the kinds of place where bars have a pride flag hanging in the doorway in June. American flags were plentiful, though, as were custom wood-carved signs. Several state parks had a stylized "Almost Heaven" etched into the state outline, hanging above a wooden swing for photo ops. Country Roads has a cultural prominence in West Virginia that Rocky Mountain High hasn't achieved in Colorado.

The roads are indeed windy in West Virginia: I felt surprise when I came upon a three-mile stretch of straight highway, complete with a road cut. Signs on I-79 proudly proclaim "Senator Robert C. Byrd Appalachian Highway System," and it definitely has a "federal money was brought to West Virginia" feel. Most of the roads are also girded by trees, which feels unusual to drivers from the western US: "there's probably a lovely scenic vista here, but all I see is green." Even rafting New River Gorge, "the Grand Canyon of the eastern US," there was only one stretch of visible rock wall; maybe late fall is the time for sightseeing. The shade was a quite welcome respite while hiking in the 90+° 50% humidity heat dome last week, though.

True to stereotypes I did see a dead possum in the middle of the road. No possum on any menu, though… not that it was ever "cuisine" as much as "what folks could trap near their house." I saw way fewer lifted pickup trucks than I would in a typical Denver suburb, though I did see people driving ATVs down a main street. A lot of the available trails are railroad grade, so you can probably go "offroading" in an economy sedan.

A coal train slowly screeched its way up the gorge as I walked around the remains of Nutallburg, a thriving coal town in Henry Ford's vertical integration plans a century ago, now a bit of rusting infrastructure, a row of coke ovens being overtaken by vegetation, and a few stone building foundations. West Virginia still ships a fair amount of coal&emdash;particularly for high-height uses like metallurgy&emdash;but long gone are the days when dozens of mining towns employed hundreds of people each. In addition to powering America's past, West Virginia is powering America's future too: a long ridge of tall windmills stand proudly atop the Alleghenys near the eastern continental divide.
flwyd: (bad decision dinosaur)
(1) How the heck did I misplace a 4-foot 20-pound bag of tent poles?

(2) Who would steal half of a heavy tent, especially when the bag of poles is in the same corner as steel tubes with more obvious scrap metal value?


Yesterday, I packed the truck for a festival next weekend. While trying to fall asleep last night I said "Oh, I forgot to grab the poles, that would be important. This morning I searched the shed, the other shed, the other-other shed, and the garage with confusion. I remember setting it up in the back yard in mid-April to dust off after the eclipse. I remember taking it down in a bit of a hurry because rain was coming. I remember the empty pole bag was hanging on the back of a chair, since it's accumulated a lot of playa dust over the years. But I'm pretty sure I remember putting it in the usual corner of the shed, and there's not a lot of places for a bag of Kodiak tent poles to hide around this house.


Added, Tuesday: (3) Did I disassociate while packing the truck?

Crisis averted. The poles were where they were supposed to be all along, and packing them was such a pedestrian task that I didn't remember I had done it. Clearly I need more sleep. Which I can get, in the mountains, in my nice big tent :-)
flwyd: (big animated moon cycle)
As we hit the road, 7 day weather forecasts for the eclipse were looking dicey. The "raining all day Monday" forecast quickly turned to "partially cloudy all day," with a line of clouds along the eclipse path from the Rio Grande to the Ohio valley. We were committed, though, and set off to our campsite in Arkansas. "Pray to your favorite weather and sky gods," I said in my email to campers.

Weather in the Ouachita Mountains turned out to be fantastic. The first night was a bit chilly, but the rest of the week featured sunny days and a few high wispy clouds. It's refreshing to camp in a state that's damp enough to have a campfire without hypervigilance that you might burn down the whole forest. And as someone who's used to spending vacations on festivals or distant adventure travel, having a vacation with just a couple dozen people and no schedule of events was a nice change of pace. The night before the eclipse the forecast was still calling for "partly cloudy," with with wispy clouds that might still show the great gig in the sky. As the Earth turned to Monday we were greeted with completely clear skies, the sun perfectly visible through a clearing at our campsite. Jupiter also made an appearance, though we couldn't see the passing comet.

Many times during the two-year planning period for this adventure I was rather amused that I was driving a thousand miles on a two week adventure for a four minute experience. Totality was indeed pretty neat: "evening" came on quickly, then a dark sky with wispy solar promenances visible to the naked eye. Our position at the base of the trees didn't offer much of a views to the horizon, though I could see sunset hues in each direction. I would've loved to bask in the experience for an hour; between taking photos (a few of which turned out alright) and looking around to see what all was different I didn't get a chance to really tune into the eclipse vibes, man. Now that I've got a solar camera filter and I know solar binoculars are a thing I should spend more time just gazing at the sun.

In the days before the main event I hoisted two wire antennæ into the trees and managed to get the fake internet points award for making contacts on 10 amateur radio bands. I didn't actually make a lot of contacts, since I seemed to only call CQ on bands with poor propagation or nobody was listening. I did make a lot of park-to-park contacts—I wasn't the only one with the idea to have a radio campout for the eclipse—and made some very low-key contributions to science by participating in the Eclipse QSO Party before and after totality.

En route, I played ham radio on the Santa Fe Trail in Dodge City and the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge. The former had a really high noise floor for some reason, maybe machinery at the agricultural processing plants. The latter was a lot of fun: we started by digging for selenite crystals that form a short dig below the crust of the salt basin. The radio waves liked the site as well; I had a steady pileup for most of an hour. Sea water helps HF propagation, and a field of salt with water a foot below the surface seems to have the same effect.

We spent a day in Tulsa visiting the Greenwood Rising center and the Woody Guthrie museum. Greenwood Rising opened 100 years after the Tulsa race massacre when a white mob burned down "Black Wall Street," the black neighborhood of Greenwood, one of the largest concentrations of black wealth in America. This is an incident that wasn't talked about as part of Americas history until recently. Despite attending a racially-conscious elementary school and using Howard Zinn's book as my first high school history text, I was unaware of the Tulsa race massacre until 2019. Greenwood Rising isn't just about the massacre, but does a good job creating a sense of the place before it was destroyed and what it meant to have a thriving black neighborhood on the other side of the tracks. Modern museums are big on interactivity, and Greenwood Rising does a good job of creating an immersive experience to enhance the educational goals. The Guthrie Center was also a good visit. I hadn't known that Woody was a prolific sketch artist, many with the same incisive yet accessible social commentary as his songs. I'd also thought the Dust Bowl was an extended dry period with poor farm soil care practices leading to the fertile land slowly blowing away. I hadn't realized that there was a specific day, Black Sunday, that blocked the sun and buried entire towns.

The big rain event that had all the eclipse chasers worried all week managed to hold off in Arkansas until about 10pm; enough time to pack up most of our camp and switch from the canvas tent to a dome tent, easier to wrangle when wet. And despite a wet night, the weather gods smiled on us again, pausing the rain in the morning so we could pack the final bits. We got to enjoy some lovely scenic pullouts along the Talimena National Scenic Byway. At the top I activated Queen Wilhelmina State Park at the top of the mountain while the clouds closed in to form a wonderfully liminal cloak. Despite the high elevation all my strong signal reports were coming from Georgia, a mysterious pipeline through the ionosphere.

On the way home we spent another couple days in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation. Subdivision of Cherokee land under the Curtis Act, along with many other factors, makes the Oklahoma nations feel a lot different than the Indian reservations folks in the U.S. west are used to. Tahlequah feels like an ordinary town where several parcels are owned by natives and the tribe. There are several good Cherokee museums and a casino, but everything else feels like a typical mid-sized American town in the southeast from fast food and barbecue restaurants to big ranch houses out towards the lakes. Funky res cars, res dogs hanging out in the shade, and the smell of frybread that you might imagine on a reservation in the southwest or on the plains doesn't show up in Tahlequah or elsewhere we saw among the five "civilized" nations.

North American eclipse hunters will have to head overseas for the next two decades, so I'm glad I made a trip out of it. The 2045 eclipse will pass right over the same campsite but I think I'll stay closer to home for that one since it passes across Colorado as well. I wonder how early Valley View will take reservations…
flwyd: (sun mass incandescant gas)
For a trip I've been in some stage of planning for more than two years there's a surprising amount left to the last minute.

I didn't really think about taking pictures of the occluded sun until a week and a half ago. Mike's Camera had solar lens filters, but no adapters to fit my lens; fortunately I had a week to get an Amazon delivery. I almost forgot to get an oil change before the road trip. Duffel bags sat empty in my bedroom for a week and a half, not summoning the energy to select clothes until 40 hours before departure.

The truck jenga situation is kind of amusing; the truck seems more full for a 5-day camping trip in Arkansas than it was for two people's Burning Man stuff (including bikes) last year. "This is kind of my favorite part," Kelly says. "We get to recreate a small version of home."

It looks like we might hit near the sweet spot in attendance, which is kind of amazing. A friend and I booked two adjacent group camp sites a year in advance on the assumption that we'd find enough folks who wanted to join an eclipse adventure. But you don't want to advertise such a thing too widely, since there's only space for so many cars. So it was word of mouth with selective invitations and a kind of mental tabulation on people count, with a lot of "I don't know what I'll be doing in eight months." A month and a half ago I was worried we might be squeezed for space. A week and a half ago we were worried that we were going to have a lot of extra space, and miss out on having enough friends to share the experience with. Now it looks like we'll have every driveway in camp occupied, though a lot of folks are coming in the night before the great gig in the sky so we won't get to have as jolly a time in the woods as we might otherwise.

Despite all the last-minute scrambling, I've had all the Parks on the Air sites sorted out for several weeks though. When traveling, it's important to prioritize places to stop and play radio. There's even a Solar Eclipse QSO Party so hams can help scientists understand propagation in the ionosphere.

Google's extended forecast predicts rain all day for the eclipse; another app predicts afternoon thunderstorms and evening rain. National Weather Service's forecast only goes out 7 days, but Sunday currently predicts about a 25% cloud cover for Arkansas on Sunday; let's hope that holds out to Monday. A cloudy day would be anticlimactic for an event I've been anticipating for two years. But at least I'll get a good camping trip out of it, and some road trip adventures in Oklahoma. And if the sun's not worth looking at during totality, I can get 100 extra points in the solar eclipse QSO party for being on the radio during totality.
flwyd: (playa surface)
I bought a used copy of Dune as a young teenager around 1994, having noticed several times the series's prominent position on a shelf at the BookWorm. I was quickly drawn into the desert world. I wasn't far from the age of the young Duke, and his particular hero's journey resonated with me. I think I briefly used Muad'Dib as an Internet screen name. Stillsuits seemed a brilliant idea to a kid who'd internalized the mantra of reduce-reuse-recycle. Hooking and riding a giant sandworm as it glides across the desert seemed like the most bad-ass action imaginable. But perhaps most importantly, it was a story about an oppressed people coming together to seek justice and topple an entrenched system that valued profit above humanity. Then I finished the book, and the last chapter or two totally turned me off. The guerrilla hero whose family had been nearly destroyed by the system came back at the head of the army bringing violence and inserted himself into the imperial power structure. This was a major diversion from the arc of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. My feeling of resonance was completely lost, and I never read the rest of the series.

Over the next three decades, the flavor of the book stuck with me. Deserts have remained beautiful and mysterious to me, and National Geographic photos of the Sahara and Arabia were some of my favorite to gaze at in my family's living room. Ten years after reading the book I visited the Black Rock Desert for my first Burning Man and loved the experience of being surrounded by community in one of Earth's harsh environments, forced to focus on present-moment details like having enough water and stable shelter. Viewing technology and culture through the lens of the ecosystem they evolved in has remained an important perspective for me.

A big budget film adaptation of Dune is underway, with part 1 airing two years ago and part 2 landing this weekend. I didn't get a chance to reread the book before part 1, and my only direct exposure to the material in the intervening decades had been the strange and confusing David Lynch film adaptation 15 years ago or so. (Fun fact: I've heard that Lynch passed up Return of the Jedi to direct Dune. Can you imagine David Lynch Ewoks?) The new movie was beautiful, in a reserved way befitting a planet that might kill you if you're stuck outside in the daytime. The overall plot made sense (particularly having read the book long ago), but I recall being a bit confused and unsettled when leaving the theater. It seemed like House Atreides arrived on Arrakis and then about a week later an insider turned off their shields, the Harkonnens and imperial shock troops invaded, and Paul and Jessica fled to the desert to start the part of the story I liked best. But like, why did the shields go down and why did they only have a couple days?

I got motivated to reread the book this month. A lot that I remembered remained, bringing smiles as I read the details of the imagined geology and biology of this planet, the glimpses of religious practice, and technological innovations of a society that has mastered space travel but somehow isn't full of computers. There was also a lot that I could tell I missed as a teenager. The long-running fights between Great Houses and machinations of the imperial order had felt like the generic background story I'd been used to from fantasy novels, but with adult eyes I can see that the politics and intrigue are just as key to the plot as the ecology of Arrakis. As a substance-free kid who hadn't yet dove into the music and art of the '60s and '70s, I hadn't picked up on the spice-as-psychedelic-drug aspect. I was also far more aware now of the structure of the book's story: each chapter starts with a quote from an in-world book written about the events the novel describes; any worry that the protagonist will be killed gets countered by the fact that Muad'Dib's future actions are well documented. The narrative also steps back and forth into the past, slowly building history while the present time unfolds. It also frequently switches perspective, sharing the inner thoughts of protagonists and antagonists alike. This fluid narrative movement through time and into the depths of the mind highlights Paul Muad'Dib's mental development of visions of the future and psychedelic journeys through spacetime. (However, I don't think internal thoughts are shared from the perspective of any Fremen aside from Liet's final scene. This lets the reader join Paul and Jessica in their journey to understand the opaque culture they found themselves in.)

I better understood the book's ending this time. Throughout the book Paul sees visions of a horrible future, where he is the figurehead of a galactic religious war with himself as the figurehead. It's a future he desperately does not want, and his shift from liberation leader to sudden imperial prince is an attempt to walk that narrow path. I didn't get the same strong feeling that he'd suddenly switched personality and lost his desert knowledge. But it did still feel disappointing. Perhaps in the intervening sixty years others have written the Great Space Liberation Novel.

This time through I picked up a lot more of the character development of the characters other than Paul and Jessica. The careful construction of the supporting characters like Duncan Idaho, Gurney Halleck, Doctor Yueh, and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen do a great deal to harmonize the plot: they're playing archetypal roles, but their actions feel natural. And I think that's what was missing from the recent Part 1 movie. Having just reread the book, I picked up on all the characters in the movie and followed the whole plot. But without the character's inner lives, with only a few lines of dialog to establish them on Caladan, what they're doing and why is really hard to see. The movie misses the rising sense of suspicion before treachery and betrayal brings in the enemy forces, and Yueh's redemptive care package for the escaping Paul and Jessica is conveyed so subtly that it would be difficult for someone without book familiarity to pick up on it.

It's interesting to reflect on Dune and where it sat in history. Published in 1965, it was a year or ahead of Star Trek and three before 2001: A Space Odyssey. The main space travel zeitgeist was probably the low-budget sci-fi thriller movies of the 1950s (though Isaac Asimov and others were of course writing thoughtful other-world sci-fi). Lord of the Rings was starting to gain popularity in the U.S., but this sort of deep world-building in a novel wasn't common. Thinking of a whole planet as a system was fairly new, and the environmental movement was fairly nascent, with Silent Spring coming just three years earlier. The book also came at a different cultural contact point between U.S. and desert cultures. Despite the story taking place over a hundred centuries in the future from the Earth-time we know, the people who were pushed from planet to planet until taking up in the sandy desert of a planet are the ones who have vocabulary clearly taken from Arabic. Saharan countries had just gained independence in the 1950s and early '60s. The Islamic revolutions in Libya and Iran were years away; the 1967 Israeli war was two years ahead; the Ba'ath party had only recently gained power in Iraq and Syria and had not yet evolved into Harkonnen-style dictatorships propped up by the West, though Dune's spice can be seen as a clear metaphor for oil. The book's glossary defines terms like "jihad" and "baklawa" which are commonplace in modern American discourse, and the U.S. belligerent elites were focused on hyping the thread of communism, not Islam. In the coming years, young westerners would travel old Silk Road routes along the Hippie Trail. A story today about a messiah figure leading a desert people to overthrow colonialists extracting an international commodity from their homeland would be a lightning rod of controversy.

Over the course of five decades, Dune developed a reputation as very difficult to adapt to the silver screen. I think I now understand why: the strength of the book isn't just in its stellar work of fictional ecology, it's in its deep exploration of the inner world of the human mind, a nexus point on the spacetime continuum where history meets possibility. "Show, don't tell" is crucial for a good movie, but Dune is a work of simultaneous show and tell.

I'm looking forward to Part 2, though. If nothing else, it should have some great desert cinematography.

Florid Spam

Friday, January 12th, 2024 12:33 am
flwyd: (spam lite)
This afternoon I received two email messages from gmail.com accounts which I suspect are some kind of phishing campaign. But while I'm used to seeing spam with a kind of "horny eastern European from a dating site" vibe, the language in these is remarkably florid and high brow. Perhaps using fancy phrasing like this is a ploy to avoid spam filters: it worked; both arrived atop my own gmail inbox.
From: Valeria Leonard <bransifritik4>
Subject: Zephyrs of Yearning. Embrace their whisper?

Hi, Trevor

I found your bio and noticed your appreciation for the simple delights of life. I have your zeal for gardening, reading, and wildlife well-being. Your compassion and hobbies align so closely with mine, and I‘d adore to connect, exchange stories, or potentially even give tips for designing a booming garden. How do you reckon?

Eager to connecting,
Valeria
A booming garden, you say? Perhaps it's exploding with color.
From: Jessy Morton <jameshbernardlucash>
Subject: Verifying a few items from our conversation.

Greetings, Trevor.
Tales envelop mine domain; I‘ve dug up those in my line of work and construct tales personally. Have you ever sensed connected to a narrative‘s resonance? Which part characterizes your essence?

I didn't connect to this narrative's resonance; it is poorly dressed word salad.

Update: I got another surreal email a few days later:
From: jessie Moon <ianschmittlinocr>
Subject: Looking into trending tech. Seen anything impressive?

Dear,
Trevor

Always, I‘ve forever felt that truly if we are to deeply understand the world, it‘s imperative to should envelop it via each of our sensory perception. Positioned as someone who designs journeys crafted for our inner being, I often indulge in the undeniable enchantment of things like aromas, feels, & also reverberating tones. Have you once been so immersed within an instant wherein moments felt to merely halt completely? What‘s could be the sensation that never fails to catapults you instantly to that time to an treasured time?
Eagerly anticipating for your insights.
Best,
jessie
Well, this sensation definitely failed to catapult me instantly to any other time.

A Year of POTA

Monday, January 1st, 2024 10:23 pm
flwyd: Ham radio on cliffs overlooking Keauhou Bay, Hawai'i (parks on the air)
At the end of 2022 a Ranger friend gifted me a SuperAntenna, an adjustable vertical antenna which can operate on any amateur radio band from 40 meters to 70 centimeters and packs up into a small and portable bag. This friend knew I might be interested in this antenna because I'd organized a Parks on the Air (POTA) activity at the 4th of Juplaya which involved a fairly hilarious misadventure erecting an end-fed wire antenna on a telescoping mast at the edge of a flat and treeless desert. A ham radio operator might tell you that a vertical antenna with a loading coil is less efficient at radiating radio waves than a dipole half a wavelength above ground. This is true. But what I realized with the SuperAntenna is that you'll make a lot more contacts on an antenna that can be set up anywhere in 15 minutes than you will if you have to get a 33-foot wire 33 feet off the ground.

In 2022 I did POTA activations on two road trips, Arkansas and California/Nevada/Utah. They were fun, but I tended to spend an hour flinging fishing line and paracord into trees so I could get a wire antenna up in the air, and if it turned out the placement wasn't very good there wasn't much I could do about it. That long of a setup period meant a POTA activation Needing a tree or bringing your own tall pole also limits the parks you can set up in: out here in the western U.S. the tallest vegetation in many parks is a bush, or a delicate tree species the park rangers would rather you not tie things to. The amount of effort required meant I didn't get on the air much when I was back in Colorado. But having an antenna I can carry anywhere and quickly erect on a picnic table or parking lot meant I could play radio as a side activity for just about any trip, whether across the country or on the way to an evening event.

I got interested in ham radio in 2021 in part so I would have a hobby that didn't involve staring at a screen in my living room during the pandemic. Parks on the Air became a great excuse for me to get out of the house in 2023. My first activation of the year was on a great sunny Colorado day with six inches of snow on the picnic table. I'd visited Sawhill Ponds on several field trips in elementary school, but hadn't visited it much as an adult. Now I'm in second place for contacts from park K-9669 :-) Most of my operating was outside, though I would occasionally hide out in my truck in cold winds or intense rains. I activated parks in Colorado, Washington (DC), Virginia, Maryland, Wyoming, Nevada, and Hawaii.

Not including "2-fers" where an operator is in two parks at once, I made a little over 1600 POTA contacts in 2023 from 27 parks. I contacted 1240 different stations, including folks in Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Chile, Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, and Sweden. Through park-to-park contacts I reached the "Worked all states" milestone with DC standing in for Rhode Island, which I still haven't worked. (Band conditions often aren't great between Colorado and New England, and by the time I'm awake, fed, out the door, and set up folks up there are often packing up to go home.) Including my outings in 2022 I've contacted 430 parks, with 520 park-to-park contacts. As an activator I've made 60 contacts on 40 meters, 1662 on 20 meters, 69 on 17 meters, 169 on 15 meters, 46 on 12 meters, 67 on 10 meters, 16 on 2 meters, and 3 on 70 centimeters (all of the latter going as far as the nearest parking lot :-)

All my radio contacts so far have been voice, but I now have a portable morse code paddle and straight key and am hoping to get enough code practice to make at least one CW contact during each activation (though I've already missed this goal on my New Year's Day 2024 activation :-) I'm also hoping to get back to throwing wire in trees in the right circumstances… like a camping trip to the national forest. For all that I love the quick setup of the SuperAntenna, its bandwidth on 40 meters is pretty narrow and it seems silly to get the extensions for 60 and 80 meters with even more coil fussing when changing frequencies. I've also yet to make 6 meter contact, and my with my IC-705 and the Beam Spinners group I should be able to have some fun with long-distance SSB contacts on VHF and UHF. I should be able to pick up a few more towards "Activated all states" en route to the eclipse in Arkansas and maybe as a side quest after lobbying Congress.
flwyd: (red succulent)
Mid-november, at brunch, Me: What do you want to do with your funemployment?
Kelly: Should we travel somewhere?
Me: well, we've got a wedding right before New Year's, so we probably shouldn't try something too far, or too high of a risk for COVID. How about Hawaii?

Mid-December, at the airport, Me: The amount of stuff we're carrying is kind of ridiculous. And heavy. I spent two months in Central America with one backpack and a hand bag of clothes. Two cameras (one got stolen). No phone, no laptop. I definitely didn't have an entire bag of radio equipment so I could earn fake Internet points…

In the end we ended up using most of the stuff. I brought a laptop because for several years I've been saying that the ideal time zone for Advent of Code is Pacific/Honolulu where problems drop at 7pm. I brought a bag of ham radio gear (radio, amplifier, tuner, batteries, antenna, tripod, coax cable, folding table…) so I could activate Parks on the Air from Hawaii, getting a step closer to "worked from all states." Kelly noticed me listening to KAPA on a portable AM/FM. "I brought three radios to Hawaii." "Yeah, that checks out." I brought three cameras (DSLR, 360, smartphone), though most of my Pixel photos are probably better than the DSLR ones. We brought snorkel masks and fins that we used exactly once, though bringing a snorkel gear bag meant we had space for other stuff, like a folding stool (good for a bedside stool among other things).

I definitely didn't need to bring a second long-sleeve shirt (when it's snowing outside it's hard to remember what "lows of 65" actually feels like). I brought several flashlights that I never had handy when I was outside in the dark. We didn't use the binoculars, though I don't think most of the whales have arrived for their winter vacation; the folks next to me on a sunset-from-the-cliffs evening think they spotted just one. I brought two towels, but don't think I really used one. I never looked at the small camp thermometer. The chocolate granola bar snacks I hoped to eat on the plane out there were nice and melted when I ate them on the way home…

You can really get a feel for the yin-yang of leeward and windward sides on the Big Island. Just looking at a satellite image of Waimea you can guess where the ridge line of Kohala, is on the Mauna Kea side. Driving from Kailua-Kona to Captain Cook and Honaunau quickly transitions from dry lava to wet-enough-to-grow-coffee-and-bananas. We visited friends in Puna for a couple days of intense driving rain, then bailed out back to the Kona side where the rain feels like a light misting. Our horseback ride guide explained that it takes about 300 years for an inch of soil to develop on new lava given ideal rain conditions like on the Hilo side; on the Kona side it can take a thousand years.

Looking at maps of Hawai'i subdivisions is kind of surreal. You know it's on the side of an irregular volcano, but the lines are just as straight and the subdivision just as rectangular and regular as in the great plains. The island is a little smaller than Connecticut with just 200,000 people, on account of the world's largest mountain and a lot of protected areas. There are broadly two types of vehicles: small sedans that can park in a tight spot at a beach and Toyota Tacomas with a lift that can get to a remote beach. I was a little surprised at the lack of electric bikes, though I only saw one road with a bike path on the whole island. A surprising number of tourists rent shiny Jeeps that they never seem to get dirty.

Early and mid December is a bit of a lull for visiting Hawaii; the tourist droves pick up in the week before Christmas as school lets out. Also, flying home on Christmas Eve is pretty cheap, though flight delays accumulate into the evening (my condolences to the flight from Oakland to New Orleans that got delayed until 10pm). The gate staff informed us that Southwest has an open seating policy, but will the 30 passengers please spread yourselves out along the length of the plane to keep the weight balanced. (I'm pretty sure they lost money on this flight.) The Safety Briefing Before Christmas was pretty good, though.

Perfect Timing

Thursday, November 30th, 2023 07:54 pm
flwyd: (xkcd don quixote)
In mid-October I had a close call with COVID after a family gathering. "Oh, I didn't realize there was a new seasonal COVID vaccine out. After I recover I should probably get that." But of course that's never the top thing on my mind.

Yesterday at work I realized that my brain wasn't being super productive, and my last meeting ended at 3. So at 2 I poked around my local pharmacy websites to see if there was an opening. 4pm at King Soopers, perfect.

At 3:40, the fire alarm in my office went off. "Great, this is when I was going to leave anyway." Walk over to King Soopers, stand in line for a few minutes, wait in a chair for a few minutes. A COVID shot in my left arm, a flu shot in my right arm, super convenient.

I walk back to work and notice everyone's still standing around, some doing the "my feet are cold, the sun is going down" shuffle. Couldn't have planned it better.


In other news, today was my 14th Googleversary. As 2010 unfurled, with the Operation Aurora hack and a big internal "pivot to social" and a consistent Google product experience, it's long felt like I joined during an inflection point. It's felt like there was another inflection point in the late 2010s. Google felt different, which isn't too surprising because the world has also felt different. (And this was before the pandemic.) I miss the anything-goes, we're-still-figuring-this-out Internet of 2009.
flwyd: (farts sign - Norway)
When you die, they should offer an option to donate your body to science, except the science isn't biology: it's physics. They'll shoot your corpse out of a canon in an auditorium full of freshmen.
flwyd: (spencer hot springs feet)
For about five months there I was either getting ready to do a thing on a date, or doing a thing on a date. By mid-May I was focusing most of my free time getting ready for Untamed festival at the beginning of the week or the trip to DC to lobby Congress followed by the jaunt around the Chesapeake Bay. After that trip I quickly got things prepared for ARRL Field Day.

At the beginning of July I decided to go to Burning Man, and also that I was going to figure out a shade structure, so I spent several weekends getting that dialed in, attending Ranger training, getting ready for Dragonfest at the beginning of August, and fitting in all the Colorado Shakespeare Festival plays. After Dragonfest I had two weekends to get everything packed for Burning Man, plus the sudden addition of making sure a good friend could come along at the last minute.

When I got back from Raining Man I spent two weekends unpacking and decompressing, then ramping up for the Peak to Peak Byway 105th Anniversary ham radio special event on September 30th. That was a big success, with a dozen ham radio clubs setting up stations at three sites (Estes Park, Ward, and Black Hawk), and over 600 contacts. The site I helped organize, a blocked turnout at Mile Marker 41, had more than a dozen people participate, operating two stations with over 450 contacts (being in the national forest and thus eligible for Parks on the Air really helped attract attention to our stations). Band conditions were great; we had a constant stream of callers on 20 meters and were making contacts on 15 and 10 meters until 3pm when we decided to tear down due to nearby lightning.

After that, it was time to get ready for my sister-in-law's wedding in mid-October, preceded by a visit by my other sister-in-law, her husband, and a four-year-old, so lots of house cleaning and reorganizing for safety. (Make sure to keep the liquor out of reach of the toddler, and also of the alcoholics.) I remembered a little late in the game that I was supposed to get a suit that would fit a gem theme; Men's Warehouse fortunately had a nice purple three-piece option, and Converse.com had bright purple sneakers in my size. It turns out most of the family interpreted "gem-colored" as either green or purple, so we matched without over-planning things. I'm also now "that family member with a big truck", so there was a trip to pick up wedding stuff, an evening of rearranging the bed to fit the rest of our stuff, and another mother-in-law visit to return all the boxes of stuff. The wedding was lovely and went smoothly, but COVID made an unwelcome appearance, claiming most of the family after returning home. After two adventures in positivity last year my immune system managed to stay negative this time around, but I felt like crap all week anyway.

Last week was a climate and environment town hall with Senator Hickenlooper that CCL had suggested in our lobby meeting in June. This was another long-awaited event, but fortunately other people did most of the work and I just had to send some email, brainstorm on quesitons, and cheer from the sidelines.

Now that it's the end of October I've finally found myself in a glorious state of not needing to urgently prepare for an impending deadline. Advent of Code is coming in December, of course, but I've already got my runner, generator, and other infrastructure ready and I'm studying the Julia programming language as time allows. And I need to start emailing folks who are interested in seeing the solar eclipse in Arkansas in April, but there's still several months before we need to think too hard about logistics.

So it's finally time to chill. I spent the snowy weekend taking care of non-urgent tasks like cleaning a year's worth of papers off my desk, de-toddlering the house, and replacing the obnoxious lightbulbs. I can restart game days (probably targeting Thanksgiving weekend). I should probably schedule all the health care appointments I haven't done this year. There's also low-priority radio tasks to get to, like troubleshooting the transceiver that suddenly stopped working at Untamed, figuring out how to use digital modes on the sBitx I excitedly bought last year and have barely used, and maybe designing a semi-permanent home antenna setup. Maybe I'll start learning Morse code. And oh hey, look at all those books I haven't read.

Sanguine Pun

Tuesday, September 12th, 2023 12:46 am
flwyd: (Trevor cartoon abi-station.com/illustmak)
I've proofread the phlebotomy report. It's typo negative.
flwyd: (playa surface)
A week before the gates opened to the public, Burning Man got hit with the tail end of a hurricane. At an event famous for harsh heat and dust, even a little rain can be a big problem. Black Rock City is built on top of an ancient lakebed, and when it rains the whole thing turns into remarkably sticky mud. All driving gets shut down, since vehicles are likely to get stuck and until they do they tear up the playa surface, making it obnoxiously bumpy once it dries out. Build week came to a halt for a couple days and from what I hear everyone hung out in camp, swapped stories, and posted amusing photos to the Internet.

When I drove down Gate Road on Thursday before the event, the ride was amazingly smooth. Once wet playa dust dries, it stays firm for many days. Gate Road, thanks to thousands of vehicles traversing a path only about a hundred feet wide, is normally a bumpy and dusty adventure; the dust from Gate Road often ends up in whiteouts that can blanket the city. So as I calmly rode on what felt almost like pavement and didn't see a speck of dust kicked up in the air, I knew it was going to be a great week for biking around Burning Man. I camp at 3:00 and C, and am intimately familiar with the 3:00 Keyhole being one of the bumpiest places on Playa. After we got the tent set up on Thursday night I biked over to Ranger HQ to pick up a radio, partly so I could bask in the wonders of a perfectly flat keyhole on the way there and back.

The first couple days were pretty much perfect temperature. I spent Friday naked but not sweating, setting up camp. At night I could continue being naked without shivering as I finished unloading the truck and headed to the portos. Monday got up to 99°F which made for a Mentor shift where we encouraged the Alphas to "ranger a lot of shade," but it wasn't nearly as oppressive as the 110° days from 2022. Tuesday the weather was pleasant again and my friend and I adventured around the city. Wednesday once again had perfect weather and I spent the day bicycling around art and tracking down delicious beverages. It was midweek and I could ride practically anywhere without holding the handlebars. Thursday brought a bit of a breeze, but remained a pretty good day for adventure. I was having such a great time on two wheels that I picked up an unscheduled Rapid Night Response ride-along shift, since Friday's forecast had a chance of rain. Last year I happened to pick the night of the four-hour high-winds whiteout for my ride-along shift, and I wanted to get one good-biking shift in, since there was rain in the forecast for Friday.

Friday morning a campmate downplayed the rain forecast. "Less than a quarter inch over the course of a day means it'll mostly evaporate when it hits the ground and won't be a big problem." I biked across the city for my shift in the ESD Dispatch building at noon. While inside the box strong winds came in, the sky grew dark, and it started raining. Hard. For several hours. A no-driving order was quickly instituted. Ambulences were spinning their wheels and medical response was limited to major issues only. A worrying call came in and the "Quick Response Vehicle" crew was dispatched on foot, walking slowly through the mud that sticks to your shoes and then sticks to itself, building "playa platforms."

After my shift ended at 6pm it was still raining and there was no way my bike was going to carry me anywhere, so I started a long and cold walk back across the city. I stopped to hold a perimeter around an incident and was thankfully gifted a trash bag I could wear as a rain coat. As darkness set in I trudged an hour back across the city, shaking mud from my shoes every few minutes. I discovered that walking through a pool of standing water was much smoother than stepping on uncovered mud. The next day I trudged back across the city for another hour; this time wearing my Keen water shoes that I expected to handle the mud a bit better. They too were a sticky mud magnet, with the extra downside that my foot could pull right out if the mud got a good enough grip. The barefoot, the socks-over-shoes, and the plastic-bags-and-duct-tape crowds were the winners of walking.

The media got wind of the shelter in place order and had a general freak out. People were calling Washoe County to find out if their friends and family were okay. Washoe called the emergency dispatch center on playa and asked if they could forward questions to us. "Not at all" said the supervisor; we have no more information about your kid's status than you do. The world freaked out, imagining a city of 70,000 burners running out of food and water, trapped in the desert. Meanwhile, the people of Black Rock City checked on their neighbors, joined the dance party across the street, and made large penis sculptures out of mud. Other fun activities included making fun of people who tried to drive out and got stuck in the mud. "If you try to drive out now, there's a good chance you'll get stuck, and you'll be last in the queue to get rescued when things dry out." I've heard that about 100 people walked to the county road (through a few miles of slippery mud) and at least 300 cars got stuck on Gate Road. But the only reason to leave the city was commitments elsewhere in Reality Camp. Pretty much everyone who stayed put had a fantastic time. The city was calmer, slower, contemplative. Gone were the nights of LED-draped eBikes speeding past while a giant art car lumbers past, blaring electronic music. Saturday, normally the night when the Man burns in a large and cacophonous ritual, everyone was left to their own devices. I hung out by the burn barrel, scraping mud off my shoes and enjoying the hoppin' dance tunes of the party across the street. People built tiny effigies, burning them atop their burn barrel, next to the drying mud dick sculptures. People took slow walks around the neighborhood and met new people, wondering if this was what Burning Man was like in the '90s. We were getting a little worried about the portos filling up, and there was a minute-long cheer when the pumper truck drove by after a couple days, but otherwise everyone was in excellent spirits. I spent Sunday afternoon on a walking tour of the inner playa art; a new experience for me since I'm usually circling sculptures a few time on a bike before riding of. On foot you've always got time to let the art sink in.

The stark contrast between the external media narrative of chaos and panic and the on-the-ground experience within the "disaster area," with people helping their neighbors and feeling a sense of euphoric connection, is a great example of the pattern described in A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. "Elite panic" is the phrase she used to describe the reaction of the media and government to a disaster situation, and those authority figures tend to assume the worst; that people won't be able to take care of themselves. But Burners have been practicing disaster areas for more than two decades. The spontaneous creation of community, the generous gifting of food, clothes, and other resources that Solnit describes in historic disasters are explicit values in the Burner community. We didn't so much spontaneously create community in response to a natural disaster as the sudden rain came to the spontaneous community we've been creating and disassembling every year.

By Monday everything was drying out. People packed up their camps, watched a two-day-delayed Man burn, and drove out in an orderly exodus. The Tuesday Temple burn felt a bit odd with so many folks gone and operations having already shifted to post-event mode, but it still felt like the somber yet joyous release of the shared space of hopes and fears, this time with an extra aura of awareness of the amazing experience we'd all shared.
flwyd: (playa surface)
A friend emailed me on Saturday and said "Sad news, I got fired this week."
On Sunday I ran into them at the store while I was getting some Burning Man supplies. "Hey, I got your email. Sorry to hear that. Since you're now funemployed, do you want to go to Burning Man?" "I don't think it's my thing." "Well, it might or might not be your thing. Go search the Internet for Burning Man and let me know in a couple days."

Monday I got an email. They're in for the adventure. "Come over to my house this evening. You can ask questions and we can talk logistics." And also some good ramen and Palisade peaches on us.
I emailed three people who'd posted about extra tickets on various lists. All three responded within two hours "Yup, still have tickets."

If your life situation allows you to suddenly decide that this is the year to go to Burning Man, I assure you that tickets are in plentiful supply right now. Tickets usually show up a week or two before the event as people realize they can't go, but this year seems to have an extra large glut.

Today a coworker asked me how packing was going. "I just started packing a second human."
flwyd: (spiral staircase to heaven)
Some time in May I looked at my calendar and realized that every weekend in June was spoken for, and that July and August were looking pretty tight. This led to yet another summer where most of my free time has been spent either having fun away from home or preparing for said fun.

The first weekend in June was Untamed a pagan gathering in its second year, led by some of the core people from the now defunct Beltania event. It featured workshops, rituals, craft vendors, neo-highland games, a day of music performances, and drum circles. And rain. Lots of rain. It's been a wet year in Colorado, so I was expecting a wet and chilly event, and it definitely delivered. I wound up sleeping in tights plus two pairs of pajama pants, hiking socks under mucklucks, a T-shirt under a long-sleeve shirt under a sweat shirt, and a winter hat. I think the cold and damp helped the drum circles find some really neat rhythms and reflective grooves, and everyone had the good sense to bring drums that wouldn't detune too bad in the damp air. There was also a ham radio Parks on the Air event that weekend, and since the festival property is right next to the Pike National Forest I hung a wire antenna in the trees on the other side of the fence and made some contacts while keeping dry in my tent. Unfortunately, after I'd made a bunch of contacts around the 20 meter band and started to call for people to contact me ("calling CQ") my high-end radio from the early 1990s suddenly got stuck in transmit mode and I noticed a distinct electronics smell. The problem persisted when testing at home where it was warm and dry, so I've got a circuit board investigation project to do when I get a free weekend. Which will maybe be October? November. Sheesh. At least the maker space at my office should be back up and running by then.

As soon as I got home I had to unpack the truck, start packing suit cases, and plan two lobby meetings for CCL's return to Capitol Hill. Kelly and I flew out Friday and stayed with a friend's parents in northern Virginia. Spending three days at an in person conference is so much more invigorating than a day and a half of a virtual conference via Zoom has been. And I love "magical hallway conversations" that emerge; I ran into people from the Before Times that I didn't even know would be there, had some great conversations with folks I knew I'd find. Even the thirty second connections with folks are so much better than a Zoom breakout room. I also took advantage of the conference hotel's location next to Rock Creek Park to do a Parks on the Air activation with a small radio and portable antenna I brought. Band conditions were challenging and it's hard to get a lot of power from a small radio but I managed to secure enough contacts for the activation to count. While I was at the conference on Saturday, Kelly went to DC Pride and got into a bit of good trouble, engaging in "lawful annoying" peacockery to establish a perimeter in front of the homophobic street preacher who probably makes money suing people who punch him for being an obnoxious jerk.

Our day lobbying Congress was great. In the past we've been very focused on putting a price on carbon emissions. This is the most effective available solution to fighting climate change, but it's a topic that has trouble gaining traction in some Congressional offices due to their philosophical outlook or the political climate in their district. This year we had carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform as dual focuses with the meeting lead and member liaison choosing the topic that's the best fit for the office. This seemed to work quite well; we had some great conversations with offices where we've previously received a tepid response, and a lot of members were quite excited to see us. I was even involved in literal magical hallway discussion: a member was in a committee meeting all day, but really wanted to meet with CCL, so her staffers took us down the elevator and around the building where we had a ten minute conversation on a whole bunch of topics before their scheduler dragged them back in to mark up a bill. I also had the honor of leading a half-hour face-to-face meeting with Senator Hickenlooper who's been a big supporter of both carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform.

We took advantage of the CO2 expenditure of flying to Washington DC to take a small vacation around the Chesapeake Bay region. Our first leg took us to Williamsburg Virgina by way of the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, in part so we could pet the resident black cats. We checked into a B&B where all the rooms were themed after a U.S. president, ate some amazingly delicious mussels steamed in a chorizo sauce, walked down Colonial Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester Street at sunset (good historic architecture vibes, cool fireflies, and reduced chaotic energy from tourist hordes). The next day we visited both Jamestown historic sites. The State of Virginia and the National Park Service both run a site focused on the first English settlement in the U.S. and its interactions with the native people. The State-run one is significantly more tourist-oriented, featuring people in period dress engaging in 17th Century crafts, recreated sailing ships (there was much quiet singing of I'm On A Boat"), and a folk park style buildings recreating Powhatan buildings and the Jamestown Fort. The National Park version is more of an archaeological site than a folk park, though it does have a working recreation of the Jamestown glassblowing site. The site is also quieter, with more of a chance to connect with the landscape and the James River, giving something of a sense of how the settlers and Indians might have experienced the place. (For one, the English woolen clothing must've been incredibly uncomfortable in June.) We finished the evening with another Parks on the Air activation from a small strip of sand at the edge of James Island. I was able to contact Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and attracted a hunter from Spain which felt pretty good for a 15 watt radio.

After a fun crossing of the Chesapeake Bay bridge and tunnel we spent the weekend in Maryland's eastern shore. The book themed B&B with a charming English hostess was much more our style. We'd hoped to take a canoe around Janes Island but the wind speed would've made paddling too difficult so we hung out at a picnic table coloring and playing ham radio. Band conditions were awful due to a geomagnetic storms, so getting the needed ten contacts for an activation took two hours. We then enjoyed a delicious crab cake lunch and then listened to Seldom Scene at the Crisfield Bluegrass Festival we didn't know was happening.

On the way back to NoVa we visited the Harriet Tubman Museum, a fairly new state park and national monument that does a really good job sharing and contextualizing Harriet Tubman's life and slavery in the mid-19th Century. Throughout the trip I was impressed with the care taken by museum curators to feature the slavery and Indian parts of the stories in meaningful ways, far beyond a token land acknowledgment.

The fourth weekend of June was ARRL Field Day when ham radio clubs across North America set up a temporary station and fill the airwaves with contacts. I've been in California for the last two Field Days, so I was excited to be able to check out the great setup the Boulder Amateur Radio Club does at Betasso park west of Boulder. I'd intended to set up a tent and operate into the late shift of this 24-hour event, but I realized that the generator would make falling asleep quite challenging and opted to get one Saturday night of the month in my regular bed. Sunday was spent recovering from the month that was, and mowing the grass that had been going bonkers from all the rain this year.

The Fourth of July long weekend brought Dead and Company to Folsom Field on their final tour. The shows were sold out or close to it, but I was able to find some spots with enough room to dance a bit. There were some really good performances, including some stellar drums & space, but I was a little disappointed with the set list. I think they only played two songs that premiered after 1979 (Standing on the Moon and So Many Roads). I knew they weren't likely to play any Pigpen or Brent Mydland songs, but it would've been great to hear something from the '80s like Tons of Steel or Throwing Stones or bring out a song that left the repertoire after the '60s like Viola Lee Blues. We also got a cat on July 1st (we'd been targeting this month for cat adoption for quite some time), so all my non-Dead energy for the weekend went into making the house safe and comfortable for a feline.

I spent the next couple unstructured weekends preparing for Burning Man. Given the amazing heat last year and the likelihood of wild and wacky weather from El Niño this year, I want to up my shade game so I have a hope of sleeping a little longer. I decided to drape a large piece of aluminet over two military surplus camo net poles, forming something of an A-frame. My ability to visualize objects and then make that imagined plan meet reality isn't one of my strong suits, so hopefully a test run of this shade structure will go well at Dragonfest (where shade that lets rain in isn't a huge win, but when else am I going to have time to try it?). I spent the final July weekend at a Ranger training campout near Ward. This was great fun, including the drinking-and-joking-around-the-campfire session, but its late season timing means I've got one less Burning Man prep weekend, and don't get a full weekend to prep for Dragonfest. Fortunately "camping in Colorado with a bunch of Pagans" is packing I can do without too much thought. I'm quite glad I decided not to go to the Ranger command team training the previous weekend, otherwise I'd have all the info for Burning Man and none of the actual necessary stuff.

August's weekend lineup features Dragonfest, then Pack For Burning Man Weekend, then Burning Man Opening Weekend, then Man Burn Weekend, then Get Home, Unpack, And Fall Asleep Weekend. That's usually followed by Clean The Dust Off All Your Stuff and then, wouldn't you know it, it's autumn equinox and time to do some kind of anniversary/birthday weekend getaway.

Yeesh. Maybe one of these years I'll spend a summer just hanging out.

Thunderdome API

Friday, June 30th, 2023 07:26 pm
flwyd: Go gopher (go gopher mascot)
// Compares a to b, returns the larger number.
math.max(a, b) {
  return a > b ? a : b
}

// a and b fight a cage match, returns the worthier number.
mad.max(a, b) {
  return a ⚔️ b
}
flwyd: (Om Chomsky)
I just posted this on a Burning Man mailing list in response to a document encouraging use of "person-first language" in the context of mental health. It collects some thoughts I've had for awhile, and I think are worth sharing more broadly.


I feel that using a term like "my neighbor who has autism" rather than "my autistic neighbor" creates a sense that autism is a temporary condition—similar to "my neighbor who has a sports car"—or is somehow separate from their identity as a person, similar to "my neighbor who walks with a limp." As someone who may be on the autism spectrum[1], being an aspie is a pretty core piece of my identity. No matter what I do in my life, I'm never not going to be on the autism spectrum[2]; there's no drug or therapy that will cure me of Asperger's syndrome. And for me it's not even a "side trait" like the fact that I have brown hair or am "kinda tall". Autistic traits like spatial-symbolic thought, deep interest in narrow topics, complex language use, and detailed rule systems are some of the things about *me* that I'm likely to emphasize if I'm writing my own biographic blurb.

(Also, autism isn't a mental illness, any more than being left-handed is a physical illness. It's a different way of processing stimuli and thinking about the world. Autistic people's brains work differently, but they're not sick.)

As someone who loves the nuances of language, I share the interest in adopting terminology which uplifts people facing challenges and moving away from insulting language. Unfortunately, I find the position of person-first language to be frequently underwhelming and counterproductive. A couple examples:

The document that D shared encouraged the use of "person who experiences substance abuse challenges" instead of the term "alcoholic." The former is fifteen syllables long and sounds very clinical, even sterile. "Alcoholic" is four syllables long and has a rhythm to it: two syllables end in "L" and the other two have a hard "C". The double hard "C" gives the word punch: hearing someone say "My name is Chris and I'm an alcoholic" has an impact in our auditory pathways in a way that "My name is Chris and I experience substance abuse challenges" does not. And a statement like, "My name is Chris and I have a problem with alcohol" sounds to me like a weasel word that avoids the full impact of what's going on; it suggests that "If I could just solve this one problem, I could drink like a normal person."

At a different event, some friends of mine run a Phoenix Circle for people in recovery. They identify as alcoholics and use that term, because they see it as a key piece of who they are: their brain responds differently to alcohol than typical people do, and they need to keep that awareness in place in order to avoid doing themselves harm by relapsing. And they were able to make significant progress in overcoming this challenge by recognizing their alcoholism and how it's something that's always going to be part of them. They're not going to stop being an alcoholic, but they CAN (and did) stop drinking alcohol. This way of framing things might not be the solution for everybody, but there are a lot of folks that it has worked for.

Perhaps the first time I heard about people-first language was a campaign to use the term "people experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless people." The former is a mouthful to say (ten syllables versus four), and yet it still "others" the people in question. We don't use the phrase "people experiencing homeownership," we say "homeowners." We don't say "people experiencing wealth", we say "rich people." We don't say "people with high physical strength", we say "strong people." Despite a goal of changing language to remove stigma, this creates a lexicon of phrases which are said out loud only used when referring to marginalized people.

The document starts by saying "We have all heard derogatory terms used to describe
someone who has a mental illness. Here are a few to jog your memory: Cuckoo; Mad as a hatter; Screwy–having a screw loose; Bananas; Loopy; Crackers; Wacko (whacko); Loony; Nuts; Freak; Crazy; Weirdo." In my lexicon, several of those words are descriptive, not derogatory, and they have nuanced meanings. I will often self-identify as a weirdo; I've never thought of the word as being about mental illness and more about having interests and behaviors that are outside the mainstream. (Black Rock City is a place full of weirdos, and that's what makes it so fun.) Likewise, "freak" is often used as a term of self-identity, particularly when prefixed with a classifier like "music freak" or "climbing freak." To my ear, it's only derogatory if the speaker has a negative opinion of the thing the freak is into. I use "loopy" to describe a specific set of cognitive behaviors, which can be brought on by lack of sleep, independent of cognitive ailments. In my family, "crazy" is used as a judgement-free descriptive term for many of our good friends. In our house, "Bob is crazy" isn't a positive or negative sentiment; it's just a non-awkward way of saying "Bob has some significant mental health illnesses." And an interesting note on "Mad as a hatter:" the association between hatters and mental illness stems from the 19th Century use of mercury in hat making; it's a physical neurologic illness that manifests like a mental illness.

The way I think about social language, the goal should be to *change the negative perceptions of mental illness and substance use,* not to change the words we use to describe them. We can keep the psychoacoustic power of a word like "alcoholic" or "crazy" while speaking positively about the person. (My family thinks highly of many of our crazy friends.) The document says "Person-first language separates the individual from the symptoms they experience." This strikes me as striving for a sort of Cartesian dualism, that there's a self which is somehow independent of mental and physical sensations[3]. When I've had physical illnesses, I don't want to separate and compartmentalize those experiences: my body hurts, my body's not working the way I want it to, but by gosh it's happening to *my* body, not some avatar in the metaverse. Some of those physical ailments are temporary, and can be overcome through action, medical intervention, or the passage of time. Others will be with me the rest of my life: I have achalasia (a physical illness) and it's important that I remain in touch with my body when I experience trouble swallowing: the symptom isn't separate from me, it's part of me[4].

It strikes me that mental illness is even more personal in this regard: many physical illnesses are available to our normal senses: we can look at a broken arm or an arthritic joint and understand the physics of how it works, or compare it to other arms and joints to see how it's different. But our mental experiences are in a rich inner world that's not easily accessible to other people, and difficult to measure with our usual sensory apparatuses. A person may be able to overcome a mental illness, but that illness isn't something that's happening separate from the person: it's going on in their mind, in their brain, in their body, and in their daily life. And I want to honor that experience with a word that carries the power of the challenge that they're facing, not a long phrase that sounds like it's from a clinical research paper. The more short syllables with hard consonants the better. If there are words with negative connotations that we want to move away from, let's make sure to pick words that have a similar strength when we hear them out loud. I tend to find words with a germanic root carry more power than polysyllabic words that came from Latin during the Renaissance. And if a word is easy to say and has a good ring to it, people are likely to actually use it in the course of normal conversation.

Acknowledgement: my focus on syllables and phonemes here was inspired in large part by George Carlin's excellent piece on soft language.

[1] By the time I learned what the autism spectrum was I'd learned enough about my own peculiarities and how to interface with the world that I've never pursued a clinical diagnosis. I hear people talk about their experiences with autism and read descriptions of Asperger's syndrome and think "That sounds a lot like the way I think and behave."
[2] Depending on where one draws the edge of the spectrum, I suppose.
[3] The phrase "mental and physical" is also a sort of dualism, and I think we often forget that mental sensations are often closely linked with our physical bodies. One thing we learn as Green Dots is that giving someone water and a snack may help tremendously with what presents as a major mental challenge.
[4] If I disassociate from the sensation in my esophagus, I'm just going to have a worse physical experience in a few minutes.
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