Done Since 2022-02-06

[mdlbear]

Got a little bit done; notably (finally!) canceling my Apple TV subscription, which I should have done months ago when I realized that their "Foundation" series wasn't worth watching.

I have a bad habit of pushing things to the side of my mind and not even thinking about them, much less doing anything. Probably more of an addiction than a habit. Now that I think of it, it may have something to do with my difficulty finding things to write about on Sundays and the occasional Thursday. Possibly related to alexithymia -- see Thursday's links about autism and alexithymia on Thursday.

Last Sunday's APOD: Blue Marble Earth was basically a travel poster, including the delightful blurb, With its abundance of liquid water, Earth supports a large variety of life forms, including potentially intelligent species such as dolphins and humans. Please enjoy your stay on planet Earth. Sounds like a nice place to visit, but from what I've heard about how the humans are trashing it I'm not sure I'd want to live there. Probably still beats Henriada, though.

Some amusement on Friday with the news that a Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems. As I understand it, this isn't the first such problem Mazda has had.

Notes & links:
0206Su  * litter boxen
  & Awake 2:55; down 3:45; awake 4:45 (never got back to sleep); down 5:40ish; dozed?
  * up 7:30ish; S=6:10; shower
  @ APOD: 2022 February 6 - Blue Marble Earth
    " With its abundance of liquid water, Earth supports a large variety of life forms,
      including potentially intelligent species such as dolphins and humans. Please enjoy
      your stay on planet Earth. "
  * V expected to visit this weekend to pick up the quill-work heart
  % 3:45 having a great deal of trouble starting anything, so puttering with mic stands
  * cancel Apple TV subscription  -> one day before it auto-renewed, so go me.
  @ Secularism in the US is Larger, More Diverse and More Dynamic Than Ever, But You
    Wouldn’t Know it From the Media | Religion Dispatches one can hope, anyway
  @ Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room - The New York Times 
  : Call from m; their friend k and its chosen brother j'
    may need crash space in the Box Room for a week or so.  -> not so far
  * load dishwasher, change recycle bags
    -> lower back pain, unsurprisingly.  Heat, meloxicam

0207Mo
  & awake 2:30; bathroom break, some reading; down 3:30
  * up 7am(alarm); S=6:58; forgot night guard - growf
  @ med_cat | Smile ;) (via andrewducker)
    Some grammar walks into a bar
  * edit N's revisions into tomorrow's GS post.
    -> manually via `git diff --word-diff` looks simplest -> took about 2h
  * laundry
  * charge Molly
  * take out kitchen and bedroom garbage
  * clear iMac and recording gear out of box room; ensure both fridges running
  * added alt text to images in tomorrow's post.  Still not sure how to find a balance
    between alt text and caption.

0208Tu
  * up 6:30ish; S=7:23
  * Post GS; boost on FB, TW
  ~ retrieve boom from box room -> not where I remember seeing it, so I either took it in
    or possibly left it next to the door where I wouldn't have seen it.
  * 10am support group
  * Call Skagit Regional Health about Colleen's recent appointment reminder
  * kind bars bought at Payless.  Was hoping for donuts too, but...
  * Central Market:  Sweet Mango chutney, lime relish, kimchee, cambozola, eggs
  & Walgreens (145th st) for sewing kit and eyeglass kit. (lost screw on driving glasses)
  % 4pm (mentally) wiped out
  : Weird problem trying to send $ to a paypal.me account
    -> created a personal PP account (under s@s rather than s@t).  That worked.  Should
       have done that earlier, really.  Now I have to sort out which payees to switch.
  % PM rituals + making the bed took ~45min -> back pain ~p~=4.5
  % meloxicam with pm drugs; heat
  & guitar: Millennium's dawn

0209We
  & awake 1ish
  * up 8ish; S=7:43
    % spent the last hour in bed dozing and thinking about the zeros of Riemann's ζ fn
  # G, when I tried to explain my recent excursion down the Riemann rabbit-hole, descibed
    it as "vorpal".  For some reason, many of my mathematical rabbit-holes are vorpal, and
    end up in places like the zeta function (including 1+2+3...=-1/12) or the monster
    group. Some time ago it was mostly the Banach-Tarski paradox or category theory
  @ How to Use Ritual to Support Deep Work and Stay Focussed

0210Th
  & awake 2ish; down 2:30
  * up 6:40; S=6:11;
  @ The 100-Hour Rule: Forgotten Study Shows How You Can Become World-Class In 100
    Hours
  @ On Valentine's Day | Catherynne M. Valente on Patreon
    Valentine's Day - Wikipedia
  @ A Conceptual Analysis of Autistic Masking: Understanding the Narrative of Stigma and
    the Illusion of Choice | Autism in Adulthood (via “No you’re not” – a
    portrait of autistic women | Wellcome Collection
    " Alexithymia is defined as difficulty identifying one's own emotional states and
      distinguishing them from bodily states, and has a prevalence of around 50% in the
      autistic population.  Difficulty identifying one's own emotions can make it
      difficult to self-regulate, ... "
  @ Weird ‘superionic’ matter could make up Earth’s inner core | Science News
    Superionic iron alloys and their seismic velocities in ...
    Come on in, the water is superionic | Lawrence Livermore ...
    Superionic water - Wikipedia
  @ Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress | WIRED
  @ How to Ethically Sell and Donate Your Unwanted Stuff | WIRED 

0211Fr
  & awake 3am; S=3:34; down 4ish
    % while trying to sleep, my thumb against my lips triggered an emotional attack that
      got me closer to tears than I've gotten since Colleen died.  Not all the way, though
  * up 5:50; S=5:16;
  * post GS: Soft Camp, Hard Landscape  -> on Delta -- had to install charm, python2 :P
  * walk: just up the 3/4 block to the W. corner and back down.  But still...
  @ UPDATE: CNIL decides EU-US data transfer to Google Analytics illegal
  @ Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems
    Reboot loop caused by image file without an extension.  WTF??
    " The very simplified version is that the head unit loaded this image into its cache
      and tried to decode it, hit the software bug, locked up and watchdog rebooted. The
      first thing it does when it reboots is tries to decode the image, and locks up and
      reboots, forever. "
  % 7pm I've just been drifting most of the day
  * when installing charm (Honu/opt) need to ensure that python2 is installed
    ended up having to force push to github and gitlab because I'd had gitlab as the
    default remote.  No idea how that happened.
  @ A ‘stealth’ Omicron subvariant is now spreading, worrying experts

0212Sa
  * up 8am; S=8:29;
  : Good news from GM -- the new battery packs for Molly are in
  @ What We Lost – Rands in Repose
    " Who is this?  Princess Leia, right? End of Rogue One. Wrong, this is not Princess
      Leia. / This is. /
      Chances are, your brain can tell the difference between the two photos. The first is
      a computer generated image (“CGI”) and the second is a straight-up photograph. "
    % Actually, _my_ brain can't.
  % I don't think I have any recordings of Colleen's voice.
  : there's a copy of the LJ backup, in XML, on Nova in .ljbackup/  So I don't need to
    figure out how to do it again.  It has IDs, so I can figure out the mapping and repair
    links in DW.  Should move it to dw-post-archive and put it under git.
  % meloxicam 9:50ish

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The infotainment system gets corrupted just by receiving an unrecognized file type? That sounds like really bad coding. I should revive "Mad File Format Science" long enough to post something about it, after picking up a little more detail than that article has.

Update: Here's the post. I had to learn a little about RDBS to understand what was going on.

[mdlbear]

Good article! Thanks!

[azurelunatic]

It's apparently a different model of Mazda than the one afflicted here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-virus/

(% followed by a space was also a thing that the infotainment system didn't know what to do with)

[madfilkentist]

That's different, but it suggests Mazda has an ongoing problem with its infotainment software.

re Foundation

[gingicat]

I basically went "this is a story about a Galactic Empire and predicting history" rather than "this is an adaptation of a particular book" and enjoyed it quite a lot.

Re: re Foundation

[mdlbear]

Even aside from the alleged connection with the books, there were too many inconsistencies -- e.g. the information density of the "books" and Dornick's impossible math abilities -- for me to keep my disbelief suspended, and the level of violence and casual cruelty was high enough that I probably couldn't have kept watching even with a connection to the books.

YMMV, of course.

Re: re Foundation

[gingicat]

Re Gael, I figured it matched well with Hari.

The casual cruelty... it had a purpose in the story? After watching The Expanse I was willing to see where it led, especially since it was clearly deprecated by the author. I hope that doesn't make you think less of me.

Re: re Foundation

[mdlbear]

I hope that doesn't make you think less of me.

Hardly. I just have a very low tolerance level for it. Haven't seen The Expanse; I had to look it up. Turns out I hadn't even heard of it, which says something about how out-of-touch I've become.

[firecat]

I misread superionic matter as superironic...

[danceswithlife]

In case you missed it, an author looking for a better earth image for his book cover, went thru the Apollo images of earth and reconstructed a number of them, including some that haven't been widely posted on the internet yet. Commentary and images are on his website: http://www.tobyord.com/earth

An article about his work, with some of the images, is in in Astronomy: https://astronomy.com/news/2021/04/what-does-earth-really-look-like?

There are several I thought were out of the ordinary.

[mdlbear]

Thanks! Those are stunning.