SoylentNews

Just two things really sums it up:

When a man tells me he is a Sovereign Citizen, I give him a cookie.

Also, it is my understanding that Libertarians were diapers made of hemp, as that is what the Constitution is printed on.

What is your own personal take on Libertarianism?

New York Parents Are Turning to Reiki Healers for Their Stressed Kids

Wikipedia: Reiki

Ethics for Soylentils: Part Second.

We left off with the objections to Utilitarianism, before we were so rudely interrupted. But before we go any further, it would be a good idea to give some more general categorization to ethical theories. The entire opposition to ethics as an attempt to impose rules of behavior is actually mis-placed, unless you actually are a sociopath, in which case none of this is addressed to you. But we will need to establish what I like to refer to as "normative force", or what exactly is the basis of an obligaton to act in a particular fashion, which is regarded as "right".

There are some that oppose any "ethics" as an attempt to force, no doubt "down their throats", of some arbitrary value system or the other, most likely based on some religion, which is probably based on a bunch of old men trying to make it with high-school girls, or run for the United States Senate. And of course we all sympathize with that. But the costs of moral relativism are having to admit that any value system is just as good as any other. And this is demonstrably false. How demonstrably? Well, here we go.

The simplest power-point version of ethical theory is to divide them into three categories: who, what, or why. Slightly more expanded, they may be called "character", "intentions", or "consequences": or "agent, act, outcome". Now is should be easy to see why Utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethics. Actions are good or bad depending upon their consequences. Of course, what has always bothered me about this is that judging an action by its consequences just seems to be begging the question, or at least only putting it off. What makes for a good consequence? Well, utiltiarianism answers this with the utility calculus: if more are make better off, then it was a good action, "better off" being what those concerned consider to be better off. We aggregate all the "goodness" or utility of an action, and if the net is positive, countered by bad consequences, that action is good. But this leads us to the second objection to utilitarianism: can the aggregate increase in happiness offset the decrease in happiness by some?

Interesting digression: If, under utilitarianism, we want to maximize happiness, we should take into account the principle of diminishing marginal utility. As you might have come to realize by now, much of Bentham's thought is compatible with that of Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations and father of Neo-Classical economics. One slice of cake can increase your happiness level by quite a lot. A second by more, but not quite double. A third, well, more, but you almost have had enough. Four? At some point, they are shoving cake down your throat, and your pleasure levels are dropping instead of going up. Now this works for all goods? Maybe. But even if we never get to the down-side of the cure, the point remains that a poor person given any amount of a good, as opposed to a wealthy person, is going to produce a larger net gain in happiness, or utility. So, given the principle of utility, the most utility maximizing distribution of goods for any society would be communism. It just makes sense.

Of course, on the other side, some would say that allowing for less than egalitarian distribution of good could produce a situation where there was in fact more good to go around, so we can recommend a meritocracy type capitalism based on the greater social good. But in either case, there is no grounding of the system on the rights or deserts of any agents. But again, more on this later with John Rawls.

At this point I can hear our libertarian Soylentils just screaming
"Noooo!!", as they are wont to do when being reamed by the market.
But here we can sympathize with them, if only briefly. But as
Commander Spock said, "The needs of the
many outweigh the needs of the few, or the needs of the one." It
is only that we usually think this is true if the 'one' has some say in the matter. "A greater gift hath no man", etc., etc., but throwing the fat guy on the trolley tracks, well, it just seems wrong. Even if it would "save (more) lives".
And for a nice satirical explanation of "Trolley Car Ethics", see The Good Place, available on Netflix?

So, can we make an argument that conscripting people for the common good is wrong? There is no such barrier in Utilitarianism. If we think that is wrong, we need another theory. Utility is the "outcome" theory, where the ends justify the means. The "agent" theory is going to get short shrift here, mostly because I believe it is conservative propaganda. That leaves the "act" theory. This is going to get interesting. An "act" theory is going to say that actions are intrinsically good, or bad. Our Libertarian protagonist want's to say that taking from some, for the greater good, is wrong, an act of theft, no matter what good is achieved. The "act" theory is the best option for trying to rationally argue for that position.

The problem is that just asserting an action is intrisically wrong does not get us very far. In fact, it puts us right back at the level of personal preference masquerading as morality, as Jeremy Bentham rightly accuses it. To briefly recap, Utilitarianism puts this question off by not judging an act, nor its intent, but the consequences of the act, and then just accepting the judgment of the various persons involved or affects as to whether these consequences were good or bad, and then just aggregating those judgments for a final determination. One person, one vote, so to speak. But the difficulty is that if some action produces a "bad" for some, but a "greater good" on the whole, then that action, by its consequences, is good. Sacrifice of some is justified by the greater good of all. Of course, it is easier when the sacrifice sees this and acts voluntarily, but it is not necessary.

Ursula K. LeGuin just passed away. More than many writers in her genre, she could capture ethical issues in ways that clarified the central point. She wrote a short essay titled "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" that captures the problem with sacrifices: at some point, you have to acknowledge that your happiness is founded on the suffering of others. In the story, the happiness of an entire society is dependent upon the imprisonment and suffering of one individual child. At some point, when they are of age, each member of the society has to face the cause of their happiness, and consent to the arrangement. Some, the Ones who walk away, cannot do so. They leave. But as LeGuin writes, no one knows what happens to them. They walk away.

Deontology

So actions it is. Our question still is, how can this be a principled judgment, not just personal preference? Who is the boss of you? Or put more philosophically, whence normative force? This will be the primary focus in this Installment of Ethics for Soylentils, and I fear we may have to go to a third installment.

For a change, we are going to consider Immanuel Kant's ethical theory. It is kind of amazing that he is almost the only philosopher to lay down a theory that is based on obligation, and on the intuitive understanding that most people have about morality. So we launch into "Duty Ethics", the idea that there are actions that one must do, simpliciter.

The idea of "normative force" is essential to ethical theory. You can be nine ways to Sunday about what is right and good, but if you cannot come up with a motivation for people to practice it, well, it's just a theory. So the question is, as Bernard Williams put it, "Why Be Moral?", or as the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy calls it, "normative motivation".

Now, Kant is German. Nothing against that, in general, but German Philosophers tend to exacerbate the predelictions of the language. I have heard rumours that German philosophy students read the the great German thinkers in English translation, where they make much more sense. This is hard to imagine, to one whose native language is Samian Greek. But you are forwarned.

  Kant famously starts of by saying nothing is good in itself, but a good will. Right away we are into intentions, as opposed to results. There is something to this. Let's say you are an Propanol_fueled, charged by you masters with producing a weapon that will target Jews, genetically. But instead, your "product" cures clamydia, and about time, too. Do we think Prop is a good person, and what he did was a good thing, when what he was aiming at was genocide? Nope, still a bad person, even if the results were good. And we go the contrary, the biological researcher trying to cure cancer, but instead produces a pathogen that can be used to target left-handed people, and it is so used? Good person? Yes? Good outcome? Oops! But our point here is not to obfuscate Kant, rather it is to clarify him. He is saying that it is the antecedent aspect of actions that give them moral value, not what happens, but what you thought you were doing, that makes an action right or wrong. Now we all know that the road to Gab is paved with good intentions, so we will have to be a bit more detailed on this. And I think Kant actually pulls it off. But you will have to stick with us through a rather wild ride, conceptually speaking.

Alright, what makes a "good will"? Yes, we are faced with the identical question that plagues Utilitarianism, or for that matter any ethical theory. The question of "Ground". Now this is where the Moral Nihilists leave us, for they believe there is none, and can be none such. But Kant disagrees. And he believes the mass of humanity disagrees as well. Proving such a ground, however, is not as simple as it may seem. A "good will", by definition, is one that wills good things. Again, this just puts the question off. What makes an object of a will a good thing to will? Aristotle incorporates the same circular reasoning into his "virtue ethics", where he defines "virtue" as that what a virtuous person does. And, accordingly, a virtuous person is one who does virtuous things. Obviously. Utilitarianism, and Consequentialism generally, says that an outcome is good if some being thinks it is good. This has an advantage, as an ethical theory, that it treats all such judgments as given, and thus as equal. We ddo not say to the fan of Pro Wrassling that he does not actually think that wrestling is a good, we have to take his own judgment of his own good seriously. And we may even be able to extend the range of such judgments to non-human beings. So Utilitarianism is, or rather, can be quite egalitarian.

Is-Ought distinction, or why ethics is not psychology.
          But here is where the problem comes up. The problem, famously formulated by David hume as the Is-Ought Problem. Simply stated, Hume's observation was that we cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", Or to put it bluntly in the case of Utilitarianism, just because Bluto prefers watching WWE (World Wresting Entertainment) to watching opera, this does not means that he should prefer thusly. I can't believe I just typed "thusly". One should never do that, sorry. You see what I mean? But this does point up a very serious distinction: a separation of science and ethics. No facts about the world, be it human biology, historical sociology, or hylomorphism, can produce an obligation for anything to act in accordance with such facts. A dog wearing clothes and walking on its hind legs may be "un-doglike" behavior, but we cannot say that it should not do so. And of course, why does it do so, against its dog-nature? Here we have a significant point: Science can explain why organisms behave the way they do, but they cannot demand that they should behave in any particular way. So your dear author here, having been conditioned to write in certain ways, including the occasional egregious use of "thusly", no doubt does so on occassion, but that is no argument that he should not, or that he should. Alright, what we are after here is the idea that morality must have an entirely different ground than the facutal, empirical, scientifically studiable world. This is where Kant takes us. Now for you "spiritualists" among us, chill your jets. Supernatural is not what you think it is, and isn't it funny that your god hates all the same things that your hate! What are the odds? But the point remains, explanation is not the same a moral justification. Remember that.

Transcendental Method

Kant circumvents the entire issue. This is why he is hard to follow, he is not putting forth a theory of value, but instead a theory of obligation. Thus the ground is not the ground you might have thought it was, and in fact, as the Philosopher Barack Obama said, the ground may have shifted under your feet. The ground, in fact, is not what is, or is considered good; it is what can command you. We launch off into Kant's Transcendental Method. Okay, here it is: for everything that is, there are certain necessary conditions for the existence of that thing. We are in danger of committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent, but we will let that slip for now.

Kant's famous Critique of Pure Reason utilizes the same argument. This always reminds me of what a fellow philosopher once said to me: "every philosopher really has only one idea." I guess that was his! But Kant applied his transcendental method to reality, or, what is in fact, phenomena. In order for something to appear to a consciousness as an object, certain conditions are necessary. Three of these, to cut the argument ridiculously short, are a subject, space, and time. No subject, no object. No space, no distinguishing of subject from oject. No time, well now, where were we? You should get the point.

Now we move on to ethics. In order for there to be a right or wrong, there must be something that is a prior, or that is a priori in Latin, that makes it right, and this has to be a necessary precondition for something to be "good". Kant undertakes to produce a "metaphysic of morals", or that is, the formal or logically necessary structure of any system of morality whatsoever. This means that consequences, or even things like desires, cannot be the basis for morality, since they are all matters of a posteriori knowledge. Now this will strike almost all empiricists (from the Greek, ἐμπειρία,"to try") as completely insane, but not surprisingly, most empiricists are Utilitarian, or at least sceptics or Buddhists.

What follows from the consequentional nature of most other ethical systems is that we can never know what we should do until we know what it is we want. And more importantly, if we do not like what is entailed in achieving the end we desire, there is always the simple solution, "Stop desiring". And, well that is the Buddhist solution in a nutshell, but also famously addressed by Janis Joplin, who sang. "Oh Lord, won't ya buy me, a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends." The "Lack of Mercedes Problem" has several solutions, of which prayer is only one. One could make money, even though that did not seem to work for Janis. "Worked hard all my like, not a penny did I save;". Or credit, fradulent credit, car-jacking, all of which entangle one in further potential difficulties. The simplest solution is, "just stop wanting a Mercedes." Problem solved. So the real question is not what you should do, but how badly do you want the outcome? (We are going to leave aside the question of efficacy of any particular course of action.)

Kant distinguished between hypothetical imperatives, which are like the "How to own a Mercedes today!" scenario above, and obligations, what he calls "categorical imperatives", moral commands that you have an obligation to do, no matter what you want, so you cannot just decide not to want to do what it is that you must do. The existence of such commands is the question here, and perhaps it is better to reverse Kant's own explication of it. So we pose the question, not what duty is, but what is it that is the necessary pre-condition for duty, what would it take for an imperative, a command, to be binding upon you? Back to the "You're not the boss of me!" retort. Okay, then, who is?

There are two aspects to Kant's Categorical Imperative, universalization, and the "end-in-itself". The universalization might cause some objections. But think, if something is right for you to do, does that not mean that it is also right for anyone else to do, as well? We might refer to this as the "Golden Rule", with some provisions. The end-in-itself is the more interesting part, however. I have often be perturbed by fundie Christians, with their insistence that atheists cannot be moral. I finally realized that what they were saying was a version of Plato's "Great Chain of Being". In order for there to be, let's say, "blue", there would have to be, according to Plato, a perfect exemplar of "blueness", something so blue that anything blue would have to be included under it as a lesser blue. Now for Plato, and for Kant, and for the Xian Fundies, if there is no perfect being, there can be no lesser beings. Pause. Think about this. Perfect blue. That means that Peacock Blue is blue, but it is not "Perfect Blue",and is only a sort of blue by participation in the idea of "perfect blue". Perhaps this actually makes more sense in terms of morality.

If there is no ultimate, final, good, then nothing can be an instrumental good. Aristotle recognized this, and thought that there has to be some good that is only a good-in-itself, and not a means to some other good. He took a survey, and determined that this is happiness. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,Book I, chapter 1.) Kant disagrees, for the reason that happiness is only valuable because someone values it. This is our crux, the question we have for Soylentils: is something valuable simply because someone values it? But if this is the case, value is,well, subjective, and worse, random! Now Kant avoids all this by starting off by saying that the only thing good in itself is a good will, and that a good will is one that can will, rationally, only good, because it is not determined by any interest or bias. But then he does the switch: A good will is one that does what it does out of respect for the law. We are iffy on what exactly Universal Moral Law is, but evenso, we can respect any being that could, whether it does or not, respect the law, as a law, as a categorical imperative. Thus Kant's Third Formulation of the Categorical Imperative is:

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section.

Now the consequences of this, if I may use the term, are quite extraordinary. Respecting another means recognizing them as a rational being, and respecting them as a rational being means, if nothing else, respecting their judgment, their freedom of judgment. Thus, messing with their judgement, by for example, lying to them, on the one hand is quite definitely using them as a means to our ends. But more importantly, it is interfering with their own free judgment, by getting them to rely on our own averred opinion, rather than objective facts. In other words, using them as a means by disrespecting their right to the truth.

Now I am going to cut to the chase, since no doubt we might have exceeded the mental ability of some Soylentils, and that is no reason to dispararge them, but we will keep it short. Kant insists on universal moral laws, not subjective laws, not "different view or values", absolute commanding moral laws. But the interesting part is that Kant realizes that the only way such laws could have purchase on a rational being, as opposed to one, for example, that might have interests that could be affected by breaking the law, is if that particular rational being make the universal law a universal law for it self. The law is not the law because any other being declares it to be the law. It is law, and binding upon you law, because you legislate law for your self, as a free being. No way out, bro!

Now the kicker: You legislate universal moral law, and so that law is obligatory for YOU. Respecting any other rational being means you have to respect their legislation of universal moral law for their own self, as well. So, obvious question, what about when our "universal moral laws" diverge? Well, obviously, we cannot both be right. As it was laid out in the movie "Highlander",

There can only be one!

However, and here is our point, lusty Soylentils, respecting the other rational being means you cannot coerce, or decieve, or canoodle or cajole, this person that is so wrong about what is right and wrong. But what you can do, is seek to persuade?

A rational being makes their own determinations based on reason,and the facts of the case. If you think they are in error, as a matter of respect you owe it to them to correct them. But here is the point: The only way to respect another is to offer them a rational argument. If the argument succeeds, it is not you that are forcing your opinion on another, it is they themselves that force the conclusion of a well argued argument upon themselves. Jurgen Habermas calls this "the forceless force of reason". But this does suggest how silly all the attempts at "culture wars" are, as if just managing to get a bare majority to agree with you, or that a capture of the state to enforce your ideas, amounts to a hill of beans. Give me an argument, leave me free to make up my own mind, but do not attempt to force your values onto me. If you do, we will have a whole 'nother level of intercourse, if you know what I mean!

(Side Note: I have tried this on TMB, to no avail. How many rational arguments do you have to offer before you can say you tried, at least?)

I cancelled my Comcast Internet over the weekend because money is tight. I'm able to use my iPhone's personal hotspot which kinda sorta works most of the time. Strangely, the Personal Hotspot does not work as well at home as it does on the bus or train.

When I did that, I also cancelled my Antminer L3+'s Internet connection.

Well at least I'll get some quiet for once. LiteCoin is at forty or so; my Comcast was fifty so for mining alone it's not worth it.

However if you feel that cryptocurrencies aren't going to collapse anytime soon, it would be a good time to buy some.

(Reposted from my email to a cast of thousands.)

In Europe, they call November 11th Armistice Day, as World War I ended at 11:00 AM on November 11th, 1918.

I ask that you honor our veterans in quite a grim manner: please read "All Quiet On The Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque. "Western" because Remarque was a German soldier - but it's been long enough that we should not hang on to our anger anymore.

That same spirit of forgiveness is evidenced by Aircrew Remembered. My dear friend Stefan Pietrzak Youngs works on it with his brother Kelvin, who started this invaluable historical archive to honor their father, a Polish fighter pilot who perished in a training accident shortly after the end of the war. Here's one of Sgt. Aleksander Pietrzak's pages there:

• 316 Mustang Squadron III Fl./Sgt. Pietrzak 'Diver' Kills

When Sergeant Pietrzak perished, Stefan was only three months old.

In his book, Remarque mentions just one war atrocity that was committed by American soldiers: when fresh German troops arrived, the battle-seasoned soldiers advised them to file the saw teeth off their bayonets lest they be captured by the Americans then disemboweled with their own bayonets.

My own father served in Vietnam, a Missile Fire Control Officer aboard the USS Providence and the Wilson. The Fire Control Officers were the ones who pressed the buttons that actually launched the missiles; had my father not been so quick on the draw, hundreds of men - including him - would have gone to Davy Jones' Locker were a North Vietnamese MIG fighter to have sunk their ship with its own missile.

Dad never told us that the Talos Naval Anti-Aircraft Missiles could be fitted with nuclear warheads, but that fact was later declassified. An Air Force fighter pilot who was scrambled during the Cuban Missile Crisis regarded the nuclear anti-aircraft missile as "the stupidest weapon ever invented". When I mentioned the Talos' nuclear capability at Hacker News, someone replied that "The first Taloses had poor accuracy, and that was at a time" - the 1950s - "that atomic bombs seemed like a good idea for everything".

Grandpa Speelmon was a surgeon and a Captain in the US Army Air Forces Medical Corps in San Antonio, Texas. I don't know much about my grandfather - Estel Rex Speelmon, he went by his middle name - but reading Wikipedia suggests that he served in the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, now Randolph Air Force Base.

Grandpa Crawford was a Carpenter's Mate in the Seabees - the US Naval Construction Battalions - in the New Hebrides, in the South Pacific. He later served in the Aleutian Islands during Korea.

I actually had two maternal grandfathers as Grandpa Speelmon died in 1948. Grandpa Swope was my grandmother Florence's second husband. He and I were very close. When he told me that he was a Police Officer in Los Angeles during World War II, I pointed out that he didn't seem like the kind of guy that would make a good cop:

"In those days," Grandpa explained, "You did what you were told".

One of Grandpa Speelmon's older brothers, Ray Bruce Speelmon, died in Flanders about three weeks before the Armistice. My mother once went there, to lay flowers on Great Uncle Ray's grave. Someday I shall lay flowers there too.

Mom and Dad understandably tried to hide the horrors of war from my sister and I. This led to me having the impression that the only time Dad ever fired a gun was when he came home from work - at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, in the San Francisco East Bay - to proudly boast that he shot the head off a match at fifty feet with a pistol.

Dad's take on Gun Safety: "Never point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them. Never shoot someone unless you intend to kill them".

I read "All Quiet On The Western Front" during the Summer of '79, when I was fifteen.

Dad passed away during peacetime, in 2003 at the age of sixty-eight. His mortal remains lay for eternity in Willamette National Cemetery in South Portland, Oregon.

I will leave you with a happy story:

In Concord, Dad worked at a very small, very secure facility where they assembled and tested Terrier and Talos missiles. The Terrier was a single-stage solid-fueled rocket, the Talos two stages, the first if I understand correctly was solid-fueled, the upper stage an liquid fueled air-breathing ramjet.

One day Dad brought home a piece of the Terrier's solid fuel that was about the size of his thumb. That solid fuel looked just like automobile tire rubber because that's just what it was made of.

After advising me and Jeannie to stand well away from it, Dad placed the piece of fuel in the middle of our concrete back deck, stood well away himself, leaned out then stretched out his arm to light the fuel with his cigarette lighter.

That automobile tire rubber burnt just like the head of a match!

        "Nitroglycerin."

Never Forget Those Who Gave Their Lives For Us.

Michael David Crawford, Navy Brat

Specifically, the AC who claims that all job posts are works of fiction and that Soggy Jobs is a fraud.

It is specifically for people like him that I built it. I want to facilitate the employment of those who find it difficult to find work.

However, I am forced to concede that I'm stymied by this particular AC. I expect he has some manner of mental illness whose paranoia leads him to be completely convinced that _nobody_ actually works as a coder.

The booming Portland economy is centered around the Pearl District and its Downtown. Locate your startup there and you'll get VC like there's no tomorrow.

But you won't hire any coders.

Have you any advice as to how I can help him? Help me out here, I'm begging you!

4 green cabbages
4 lbs carrots
2 bunches of green onions (about 10-11 oz total)
1 lb radishes

Sauce contains:

8 tbsp soy sauce
8 tbsp sugar
1 cup canned crushed pineapple
12 tbsp ginger paste
3 heads garlic
2 onions
1/2 cup red pepper flakes
Some MSG

I'll put in some store bought kimchi to use as a starter.

1 cabbage makes about a gallon, so I'm using a 5 gallon food grade bucket. I bought these silicone grommets. Drilled a 9/16" hole in the bucket lid, popped it in. Airlock fits great. I'll put some vodka in it to ward off bugs (they probably won't get in, but could drown in the airlock).

I at first intended to list the openings at each of Google's locations, on the city pages for those locations. That is, on my London page I would link to Google's London listings.

That no longer seems possible.

Possibly I am wrong so I'll screw around with Google's job board some other day, but I was hoping to while away my afternoon doing something totally mindless. Listing all of Google's locations would have fit the bill.

I'm going to make spaghetti for supper tonight, but I'm not going to make my usual mountain of the stuff.

Later tonight I'll take the significant step of taking two busses to North Portland so I can visit a close friend who is a waitress at Shari's Restaurant And Pies, a 24-hour restaurant chain. I haven't visited her at work for a while because I've been busted flat. She always likes it when I do visit.

I've spent the entire night at that particular Shari's a great many times. During my homelessness they were completely cool with me doing that provided I buy just one coffee. I didn't even have to leave a tip.

I wrote quite a lot of The Frog there.

One time I was sitting at the counter while talking on the phone to a cop in Santa Cruz, California. He got all pissed off then told me he would trace my call - from his patrol car, leading me to believe that _all_ cops can do this:

"The Northwest.. Oregon..."

"I'm sitting at the counter at Shari's Restaurant And Pies just off Exit 306 off I-5 near the bridge over the Columbia River. Care to elucidate?"

Strangely, Santa Cruz' Finest didn't appreciate my kind assistance.

In The Lab: Double Capacity 2x32GB DDR4 from G.Skill and ZADAK

One of the interesting things to come out of the news in recent weeks is the march to double capacity memory. In today’s market, memory modules for consumer grade computers have a maximum of 16GB per module. This is unbuffered memory, and the standard for home computers and laptops. However recently there have been two major announcements causing that number to double from 16GB to 32GB: Samsung has developed double capacity ICs to drive up to 32GB per module with the same number of chips, but also a couple of DRAM vendors have found a way to put two times as many ICs on a 16GB module to make it up to 32GB. Both G.Skill and ZADAK fall into that latter category, and now we have both of these kits in the lab for review.

Related: HP Footnote Leads Intel to Confirm Support for 128 GB of DRAM for 9th-Generation Processors

I was only out of bed for two hours yesterday, but today I was able to work some.

I expect I'll start going back in to my office in Portland on Thursday. That would have been Wednesday but I have a follow-up appointment then. Getting to my surgeon's office and back on the bus is a huge PITA so I'm not going to compound it by going to Portland.

My doc said I'd have my pathology report by now but I don't. While the CT scan of my abdomen led him to say that my tumour was not malignant, we won't really know until I get that report.

He has a private website for his patients, which has my blood and piss test results, but not yet the pathology.