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A recent registrant, separatrix, has posted a journal of interest to the SN community. For reasons - obscure to me - replies to that journal are not possible. I link to it here so that others might peruse it and perhaps use this journal [here] to discuss these issues further.

Back in the day, when discussing architecture and algorithms for an application, it was helpful to first determine an analogous model that IRL captured the essential elements of a system we were designing. The linked journal does this to some degree and is worthy of serious consideration.

All non-trivial collective human efforts require careful organization if they are to endure and prosper. SN is at a point where the original organization wants reworking. It would be nice if we could all be on the same page in the same ballpark playing the same game with the same set of rules.

I would like to thank separatrix for posting that journal, and i hope that others might add their insights to his ideas.

--

But no one heard them callin', no one came at all
Cause they were too busy watchin' those old raindrops fall
As a storm was blowin' out on the peaceful sea
Seventy-three men sailed off to history

-Blues Image, Ride Captain Ride

Just a quick link to information about watching the Starship launch today. Please add better links if there are any.

Godspeed all!

Started spring cleaning early this year. Yesterday I tried to unload a half-dozen burned out CFLs at Bartell drug store, but they said they won't take them anymore. Called around this morning and found a hardware store that will take them, so I'll get to that later...

Meanwhile, I'm looking at the led night light (4 watt) that I leave on continuously for about 12 years now. I bought it back when led bulbs were outrageously expensive and promised to last nearly forever. Now they are more affordable, but only because designers have learned to build them with inferior parts (capacitors) that burn out prematurely. I am lucky these days to get OTS led bulbs to last a year. Boo! Hiss! I want some bulbs that I can install and forget about for twenty years. They used to make these - but I guess there was not enough profit in it.

So... hey, I've got a soldering iron, and I know how to over-engineer circuit parts, so how about... maybe fab up some DIY led bulbs? I need maybe twenty or thirty to cover every room in the house, and I don't really care much how much it costs - just so I never have to bother with them ever again.

There is a pretty good reference on the circuit design for them here [homemade-circuits.com]. Not sure what I would choose for other parts. I suppose I could buy some OTS bulbs and gut them and install my custom circuits.

So has anyone here done this already? If so, what are some "best practices" and "recommended specs"?

I do have one "dimmer" switch (in the dining room). Has anyone here fabbed up a DIY dimmible led bulb?

--

There's a reason for the warm sweet nights
And there's a reason for the candlelights

-The Bellamy Brothers, Let Your Love Flow

In anticipation of spring, I have scheduled a couple weeks of clean-up of my environment. I plan to discard a bunch of materials that I have not used in over a decade.

Among these is my treasured copy of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary of 1983 vintage, the dust of which started me sneezing when I picked it off the shelf just now. I think i have referred to it once since 2010.

It wasn't always that way. It used to be I would refer to it several times a week to check the spelling or etymology of a word, or to compare shades of meaning of synonymous terms to find the best one to employ in my compositions. It used to be the only reference I allowed myself to use while solving the Sunday crossword.

Alas, now I can barely discern the fine print of it, and it takes ever-so-long to thumb to the proper page. Now I have a hot link to Webster.com on my browser home page, and any word I am curious about is but a middle-click and a nearly-correct spelling away. Now the Sunday crosswords (both NYTiimes and LATimes) seems so simple that I allow myself no reference at all, digital or hard copy, while solving it. Of course I always seem to get a letter or two wrong - but how else can one learn.

Still, recalling how faithfully it served me "back in the day", I am loath - (looked that one up just now) - to part with it. It doesn't cost anything to leave it on the shelf, and it works even when the power is out, but if I keep it, it is simply a bit of clutter anymore.

Does anyone here still use a hard-copy dictionary anymore? Has anyone else discarded their beloved reference and found that there is still erudition in the world?

--

Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so I can't imagine why
We've all got time enough to die

-Chicago

There is a school of thought that posits that Adam - of Genesis fame - was not actually the first man, but rather the first prophet in the line of prophets that spawned the Abrahamic faiths. The crux of this is that there was nothing good nor evil prior to the teachings of the creator having reached us - hence like the ravening wolf or the ferocious lion, there was nothing intrinsically wrong in anything we did since it was only natural. Once the concept was introduced that there was a purpose-driven, life-loving God, however, good and evil could be finally identified as those behaviors which departed from that purpose and interfered with that life. Hence the tale of Cain and Abel and most everything else in the Torah.

Now I am not here to argue this idea today. I am more interested in the location. Adam is said to have appeared in the garden of Eden, and of all the locales that have been proposed as the "real" Eden, I have been most convinced by the suggestion of David Rohl that it might have been Tabriz. I think it was the documentary, In Search of Eden - which can be found on You Tube that mostly convinced me. I may well be mistaken, however, so do your own research.

What intrigues me about this location is that some six thousand years later, around 1844, another man appeared in Iran claiming to be next in the Adamic line of prophets. Ignoring every gory detail about this, I will merely note that the Islamic clergy of Iran had this man executed on July 9, 1850 in what was then downtown Tabriz.

In a sense, then, what began with Adam in Eden came full circle and was brought to a close in the same location. Curious.

So, if Iran was in fact the host to the original garden of Eden, then it would follow that some of the oldest cultural elements of civilization may have sprung from that region, and one might expect that some of the most mature concepts regarding life the universe and everything have been and continue to be evolving there.

Sadly, Iran is mostly being demonized these days - not without good reason, mind you - to the citizens of the USA, so it is a knee-jerk reaction of many in the West to eschew everything associated with Iran. In fact, most of the evils that issue out of that country seem to be caused by a minority of fanatics who have a stranglehold on governance and their oppressions are evident and well documented. To some extent, the people of that country are rising up against that oppression, so there may well be an end one day to that circumstance.

All of this is a long way around to recommending that every "educated" American should be familiar with the story of Layla and Majnun - perhaps the original "Romeo and Juliette". It is a tale familiar to most every Iranian, one that inspired Eric Clapton in composing perhaps his most famous tune. Maybe one day, Hollywood will grace us with a worthy film depiction of it.

Likewise, those who would account themselves as culturally informed might wish to peruse some of the poetry of Rumi:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Beyond

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas,
language,
even the phrase "each other"
doesn't make any sense.

and Hafez:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Will Beat You Up

Jealousy
And most all of your sufferings
Are from believing
You know better than God.
Of course,
Such a special brand of arrogance as that
Always proves disastrous,
And will rip the seams
In your caravan tent,
Then cordially invite in many species
Of mean biting flies and
Strange thoughts-
That will
Beat you
Up.

So just some ideas on how to fill your new year, or whatever.

Oh yeah, and if any of your neighbors are Iranian refugees, consider going out of your way to talk with them. For the record, I am not Iranian, but one of my neighbors is.

--
"So make the best of the situation before I finally go insane", -Derek and the Dominos, Layla

Since a new "meta" post is showing on the main page, I thought I'd add a fresh journal here to enable unregistered ACs to kvetch at leisure. Thanks to all who showed up to contribute to my previous journal - it seemed all quite civilized, belying the brutish reputation imputed to such ACs.

Of course the big news in the meta-post was that agents unknown may or may not be aiming to squat on the SN identity, raising the fear, "What if we had to start all over again from scratch?!" I shall pray that the efforts of SN staff are sufficient to maintain existing credentials and functionality.

I would also comment here how shocked I was - shocked I tell you - to learn in the latest poll (about user ids) that fully 30% of responding users own up to holding multiple accounts here, which goes a long way toward explaining why it appears so often that folks are gaming the system. Me, I'm only here to do public service, when I can manage to gather together enough seemingly valuable words - and when the music is playing.

I go in for minor surgery on Wednesday, but I will reserve that funny story for a comment later in this journal.

--
"your thoughts will soon be wanderin' the way they always do" -Bob Seger, Turn the Page

More public service here.

What with unregistered ACs banned from the front page, there is no real place for the random stranger to vent.

Then while staff slogs on through the tedium of throttling system maintenance, debating updates to policy and organizing for future functioning of the site, I am thinking to post journals open to all comments from time to time, so that those missing the clever repartee of the unwashed unwelcome ones might have a place to revisit them.

Post here at your own peril, keeping in mind that I am know to whimsically delete any and all journals when I find offensive content to have defiled them. If you find a thread you particularly enjoy, it would be wise to squirrel it away somewhere on a thumb drive or your NAS lest it unexpectedly vanish.

In fact, the day before the December 2 crash of the database, I deleted all my journals except for "The Neatly Split Electorate", so it may have been my deletions that somehow triggered the crash. Not boasting, only advising staff that there might need to be testing of journal deletion to see if it ruins pointers somewhere to something.

Sadly, all those old stale journals are restored now - not that I mind much - but for me it is unwanted clutter.

One of the problems with journals is that they do go stale and become hard to navigate to and through, which is why I think I might need to add fresh a one periodically. No guarantees here though.

Since the journal catalog is currently not appearing on the front page, most casual visitors will not know that this and future journals exist, so if you are mulling disruptive behavior here, you will be likely be wasting your time and will go home disappointed. Please realize I am only providing some deck chairs here for otherwise unwanted ACs and the registered users who enjoy their company.

--

This dog house here is mighty small
But it's sure better than no house at all

-Hank Williams, Move It on Over

Thanks to everyone who has got this site restored from backup. It's almost like the past two weeks never happened. It reminds me of the immortal words of Yogi Berra

It's like déjà vu all over again.

And in the spirit of lampooning ourselves, here is a collection of some of his other observations which seem apropos to the SN universe:

> I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.

> If you don't know where you're going, you might end up some place else.

> Always go to other people's funerals otherwise they won't go to yours.

> Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.

> The future ain't what it used to be.

> We made too many wrong mistakes.

> It ain't over 'til it's over.

> I didn't really say everything I said.

--

I'm lookin' high and low, don't know where to go,
I got to double back, my friend.
The only way to find, what I left behind
I got to double back again, double back again

-ZZ Top, Doubleback

As a public service while site maintenance proceeds, I thought I'd provide some stress testing by posting a journal to interest those not involved in the nitty gritty. So...

Never before has the American electorate been so neatly split as in the 2022 midterm voting.

Now I am not a student of political science, but the mathematician in me suspects that any time you filter democracy through partisan politics, the inevitable result will be

a) the number of parties will rapidly reduce to two

b) given enough smart people in the two parties, the share of the electorate attracted by those parties will rapidly approach 50-50

This, to my way of thinking is the fundamental flaw in partisan politics. It seems to me that a much better approach is to eliminate nominations, primaries and campaigns and rather have people vote for people they think might best serve in particular positions - whoever they are and from wherever they hail.

Surely, I am displaying my ignorance of "how true power works in the real world", but I thought I'd throw my observation out there and ask if anyone else knows of better ways.