35 Truths

 

From a San Diego Father who has identified 35 truths he learned from his children:

 

1. There is no such thing as childproofing your house.

2. If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.

3. A 4-year-old's voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.

4. If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42-pound boy wearing pound puppy underwear and a Superman cape.

5. It is strong enough, however, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20x20' room.

6. Baseballs make marks on ceilings.

7. When using the ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up several times before you get a hit.

8. You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on.

9. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long ways.

10. The glass in windows (even double pane) doesn't stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.

11. When you hear the toilet flush and the words "uh-oh", it is already too late.

12. Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke--lots of it.

13. A 6 year-old boy can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 60-year-old man says it can only be done in the movies.

14. A magnifying glass can start a fire even on an overcast day.

15. If you use a waterbed as a home plate while wearing baseball shoes, it does not leak. It explodes.

16. A king-size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2,000 sq ft house almost 4 inches deep.

17. Legos will pass through the digestive tract of a 4-year-old.

18. Duplos will not.

19. Play-Doh and microwave ovens should never be used in the same sentence.

20. Super Glue is forever.

21. MacGyver can teach us many things we don't want to know.

22. So can Tarzan.

23. No matter how much Jell-O you put in the pool, you still can't walk on water.

24. Pool filters do not like Jell-O.

25. VCRs do not eject PB&J sandwiches, even though TV commercials show they do.

26. Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.

27. Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.

28. You probably don't want to know what that odor is.

29. Always look in the oven before you turn it on.

30. Plastic toys do not like ovens.

31. The fire department in San Diego has at least a 5-minute response.

32. The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.

33. It will, however, make cats dizzy.

34. Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.

35. A good sense of humor will get you through most problems in life. (....unfortunately, mostly in retrospect)

journey

 『僕の前に道はない
僕の後ろに道は出来る』

Boku no mae ni michi wa nai
Boku no ushiro ni michi wa dekiru

"No path lies before me.
As I press on, behind me, a path appears."

The first two sentences of a Japanese poem 『道程』Dotei "Journey" by Kotaro Takamura. [Translation: Arthur Binard]

Calligraphy by Yoko Watanabe [MizaiSho]

quotes found in my notebooks

life is about growing up and not understanding things. -- eren yigit (age 6)

bloat is the enemy of promise. sadly, like supersized servings of greasy junk food, bloat sells. -- damien broderick

wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is. -- terry pratchett

practice doesn't make perfect, no matter what they say, but it sharpens our perception and improves our performance. -- david vestal

law and philosophy can't trump engineering. -- bruce sterling

audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. -- edward r. tufte

perl is a mistake, carried through to perfection.  It is the language of  the future for the problems of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. -- unknown

preoccupation with self is the greatest barrier to seeing, and the hardest one to break.-- freeman patterson

Waste indicates that you lack understanding, incorrect indicates that you lack attention to detail. -- eric naggum

an approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question. -- john tukey (1915-2000)

a six-sigma performance is, in fact, so unlikely that the tables in most statistics texts don't even include values for it. -- john allen paulos 

a poorly made picture that moves us is worth hundreds of empty masterpieces of technique. -- david vestal

twitter thread, by timothy synder [author of "on tyranny" and "road to unfreedom"]

1/20. Democracy is precious and exceptional.

 

2/20. Democracy is undone from within rather than from without.

 

3/20. The occasion to undo democracy is often an election.

 

4/20. The mechanism to undo democracy is usually a fake emergency, a claim that internal enemies have done something outrageous.

 

5/20. A tyrant cares about his person, not the Republic.

 

6/20. A tyrant fears prosecution and poverty after leaving office.

 

7/20. Donald Trump faces criminal investigations and owes a billion dollars to creditors.

 

8/20. Donald Trump has said all along that he would ignore the vote count.

 

9/20. What Donald Trump is attempting to do has a name: coup d'état. Poorly organized though it might seem, it is not bound to fail. It must be made to fail.

 

10/20. Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless.

 

11/20. American exceptionalism prevents us from seeing basic truths.

12/20. Biden voters are wrong to see a Biden administration as inevitable. Take responsibility, Democrats.

 

13/20. In an authoritarian situation, the election is only round one. You don't win by winning round one.

 

14/20. Peaceful demonstrations after elections are necessary for transitions away from authoritarianism, as in Poland in 1989, Serbia in 1999, or Belarus right now.

 

15/20. It is up to civil society, organized citizens, to defend the vote and to peacefully defend democracy.

 

16/20. Dance after the wedding, not before. Take responsibility, Americans.

 

17/20. Republicans endorsing the claim of fraud endanger the Republic.

18/20. Calling an opponent's victory fraudulent risks assassination, as in Poland in 1922.

 

19/20. Creating a myth of a "stab in the back" by internal enemies, as Republicans are helping Trump to do, justifies violence against other citizens, as in interwar Germany.

 

20/20. Persuading your voters that the other side cheated starts a downward spiral. Your voters will expect you to cheat next time. Take responsibility, Republicans.

notes and quotes from various sources

“rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed or ignored.” — chris hedges [“the greatest evil is war”]

"familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behaviour, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability." -- john kenneth galbraith

“The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another—it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.”  -- john scalzi ["old man's war"]

"we live in capitalism. its power seems inescapable. so did the divine right of kings. any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." -- ursula k. le guin

“… NIST databases foreshadow the emergence of a logic that that has now thoroughly pervaded the tech sector: the unswerving belief that everything is data and is there for the taking.” — kate crawford [“atlas of AI”]

"As someone raised to respect self-education, I find it sad that I now shudder when people tell me they have done their “own research,” a sure sign they’ve been sucked through a conspiratorial pipeline and come out the other side covered in hogwash.” — Astra Taylor

 "Gender marketing reinforces limitations.” — terry o’reilly [“under the influence“]  

"That little bit of a thing that you read through and say "I know all that" and throw on a shelf. It's the thing that the visiting sensei refers to when he says "have you read the book?" about two minutes into the seminar. Don't read it, study it." -- Kim Taylor Sensei

"Error, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said, is the site of truth far more than correctness. We are never closer to the real than when we are making mistakes, sometimes especially when we realize we are making them." -- Mark Kingwell 

"All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore."

—Ray Bradbury

 

assorted notes and quotes from various sources

 "What goes too long unchanged destroys itself." -- Ursula K. Le Guin

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar."
— “The Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens

"dependency hell" is such a lame phrase for what should be minimally described as "unspeakable life destroying dependency chainsaw horror fiesta"

if P. T. Barnum was alive today and encountered cryptocurrencies, he would have chortled, created his own currency, and would probably have said that suckers are born even faster than he imagined.

 

"Don't assume the worst thing's going to happen, because on the off chance it does, you'll have lived through it twice." -- michael j fox

“there is no limit to the ways a falsehood, by worming its way in among the holistic system of our beliefs, can bring us into sharp collusion with the world.” — simon blackburn

 

“truth does not triumph. it’s opponents just die out.” -- max planck

“Fox News, at this point, is a fantasy factory, churning out historical mythologies in real time.” — megan garber [“tucker carlson’s manufactured america”]

 

“some people are saying” is usually code for “i made up some inane story to cover up my inability to comprehend real world information and learn from, reason with.”

 

right wing could not care less about indigenous peoples, churches, justice, law, family and all the other bumper sticker apple pie things. their facades have fallen off a long time ago. if you’re still seeing the facade, you’re probably not paying attention. 

 

“vaccine hesitant” is really a sad euphemism for “anti vaccination light”.

 

in the wind

a shower of blossoms - 

sudden sword [oz/21]

 

The shifting goalposts of #cdnmedia: 

1. "We need vaccines sooner." 

2. "We need more vaccines." 

3. "We don't like the brand of vaccines we have, we need more of Brand A " 

4. "Why aren't we giving more vaccines away." 

5. "We told you so." 

-- Neil Waytowich (neilbeforezod)

 

 when we think about learning from history per santayana, we often think about the large scale. learning from our own micro-history is just as important...

 

 

good observations from the surface of the net

"How do you get people to say, “I don’t know”? I don’t know." -- david dunning

“As artists, our job is to look where others don’t. This responsibility becomes even more important at times when we are told to look away.” -- Alfonso Cuarón

"A subject is scientifically controversial when actively debated by legions of scientists, not when actively debated by the public, the press, or by politicians." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Americans: "everything in Australia can kill you."

Australians: "probably not an ar-15."

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” -- ta-nehisi coates

"This might be a good time to note that “Judeo-Christian” is not a thing and we Jews would like you to stop conflating our tradition with your American Christianity." -- rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

“History has had its ways of teaching once-dominant "exceptionalist" nations harsh lessons, but as this  involves a span of generations, citizens of those "empires" often haven't been able to perceive it happening.” — william gibson

body lets down the mind,
mind lets down the body.
it comes to us all.
— jocelyn knight [“broadchurch”]

"Fundamentalism is authoritarian by definition–it accepts a vision of “the Truth” that is sacrosanct, unquestionable, and, when found to be incompatible with reality, protected through the generation of “alternative facts,” which themselves become unassailable truths within the enclave community that is built up to sustain the fundamentalism in question." -- christopher stroop ["Educated Evangelicals, Academic Achievement, and Trumpism: On the Tensions in Valuing Education in an Anti-Intellectual Subculture"]

“The main thing we learn from studying history is that nobody ever learns anything from studying history. Not long-term, I mean, not longer than people who are in a position to do things can remember the previous round. Or, the lessons of WW2 are gone, gone, gone. Let alone Rome.” — Harry Turtledove

"if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well." -- donald hebb

"Someone tweeted to me that my father “didn’t offend people.” At the time Daddy was killed, a poll reflected that he was the most hated man in America. Most hated. Many who quote him now & use him to deter justice would likely hate him too if they truly studied #MLK" -- Bernice King