Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1183 (SoD #1650) - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE 1908.25

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1183 (SoD #1650) - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE 1908.25

Hi Mom, Second Hey Mom this week, a pace I have not been consistent at achieving.

Oh, and welcome to post #1650. Seems like a milestone.

Switching it up. Now the weekly gallimaufry, the hodge podge, will be Sundays with the Throwback on Thursday a simpler one photo and some remarks catch up on Thursdays.

I plan to try to keep to this schedule, giving myself time for curating the miscellaneous materials that I toss in here. What my two readers of my blog will discover is that I have a huge back log of stuff that I have been saving to post, and I started archiving those links and photos and music and bits of detritus in the blog on these catch-all hodge podge days of the stew, better known as gallimaufry. This archival process is a laborious one in which I cull through my email and migrate the content I have sent myself, usually something I found on my phone while away from my computer, and the messages are still sitting in my in box. I started the grand migration of content back in the summer, when work was less, but now work will be increasing in its intensity, the Geiger counter measuring my rads of extruding gamma radiation will begin to ping ever more loudly and frequently. I am not confident of getting all the material in the weeklies. But I am keen to try.

I have some new resolutions for the start of the school year. One day off a week. And when I say off, I mean NO WORK AT ALL. I need to exercise more. This means at least walking the dog every day that is not pouring rain, and on those days, I hit the gym at school or the gym I am paying for with my HOA dues. But I would like to clock more miles on my bicycle. However, given that I didn't once even ride the neighborhood in all the weeks of very little work this summer makes me dubious that I am going to achieve any of these goals, let alone the biking one.

That said, I am determined to not let work eat my life as it does. I need to be more efficient when I work and be mindful of the time I am putting into work. Like any teacher, I tend to do too much. I still plan to give value to my students, but I need to not give that value on every little thing. I will put emphasis on what I do in the class room. I am still learning. I hope to learn more from my colleagues on how to do this instruction thing well.


I may not be able to vet this random assortment of stuff as much as I would like as I am already two days behind as I type these words, but I will try to add some value.

After the Twitters, there's a series of links with some very interesting stuff, such as news of dark matter predating the big bang, Jupiter's storm quelling, and a Hyena Pig. The most obscure link is the Wird Internet week of 8/11 link, which shares how Trump named the wrong city for the Ohio mass shooting. I don't care what the tele-prompter said. If he really cared, he would remember and make sure to say the right city or correct himself. But he doesn't care. He only pretends to care.

Following is a call for action: 251 shootings in 2019 but we dont have a problem in this country?

Guns and access to guns are not the only way to address the problem but surely they're a good place to start.

Mitch McConnell makes me sick. Maybe sicker than Trump. He won't even "allow" a vote on background checks and better controls on purchasing?

Algorithms to detect hate speech biased against black people?????

Really?

And that's a big we can't fix?

Hey the Matrix is coming back for another installment. That's gonna be weird given the time that's passed and what has changed in the lives of the creators...

Cool article on Testosterone or dopamine?

Women attacked by Trump go public. I wish it had more chance of making a difference in how much longer we must suffer him.

Music - Hardware ghost.

A cool Instagram.

And then some more articles (from the Big Think), on things like self-actualization, secular humanism, more on decreasing gun deaths, why the well-meaning immigrant narrative is faulty, creativity, Schadenfreude, climate change,  and then some from WIRED, like the starnge radioactive cloud from Russia, gender-neutral pronouns, and Twitter.

Then some photos.

Thanks for checking in.

Hi Mom. :-)

Oh and a link about the TIGERS... last thing.

And so, the content, with some curating, starting with this post, which came from a friend of mine and her Twitter.

"...grief, at its worst is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response." -- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

— Suzanne Kamata (@shikokusue) July 9, 2019

Inside David Bowie's final Berlin album, Lodger #BrianEno https://t.co/EsfXiAtyDj pic.twitter.com/R7UklEl75z

— Brian Eno (@dark_shark) July 1, 2019

SOME FUN LINKS


BBC - Culture - The 1968 sci-fi that spookily predicted today

Ancient 'Hyena-Pig' Discovered To Have Once Roamed Oregon . News | OPB

https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/08/09/2254251/dark-matter-may-predate-the-big-bang-new-math-suggests

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/08/22/1453220/google-chrome-proposes-privacy-sandbox-to-reform-advertising-evils

https://www.wired.com/story/space-photos-of-the-week-jupiters-big-storm-is-blowing-over/

https://www.wired.com/story/internet-week-232/

https://afroculinaria.com/2019/08/09/dear-disgruntled-white-plantation-visitors-sit-down/


WHY - MASS SHOOTINGS?

Dayton, Ohio. El Paso, Texas. Gilroy, California. In the past two weeks, three mass shootings across the country have resulted in death and devastating community losses.

That's why we need Mitch McConnell and the Senate to take urgent action right now.

These tragedies were enabled by a country:

Where white supremacy is espoused and emboldened, paving the way for fatal acts of terrorism that follow words, chants, tweets, and policies demonizing immigrants and Black and Brown communities.

Where toxic masculinity is a consistent marker of shooters, yet we continue to ignore the obvious: patriarchy kills. Currently, guns have more rights in the Constitution than women, trans men, and nonbinary people do.

Where dark money and the power of the NRA fuel politicians to not only make cowardly choices, but to also make actively cruel and callous ones.

Where political inaction and spineless "thoughts and prayers" overshadow the moral imperative to take real action.

251 shootings in 2019. To say it is beyond time to take action is a massive understatement. 

House Democrats already passed H.R.8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, months ago -- but it's been stalled in the Senate. We've joined the call to demand that Mitch McConnell immediately brings the Senate back in session to vote on this gun control legislation today. After that, we must call upon all of our representatives to pass even more sweeping legislation that bans all assault rifles and large-capacity ammunition magazines.

And speaking of Mitch McConnell...

Mitch McConnell just keeps getting bad news.

Another wave of polls has come out showing that McConnell is the #1 most unpopular member of the entire U.S. Senate with his own voters.¹

News reports say McConnell is privately "fuming" that he’s become known as "Moscow Mitch" because of his obstruction on election security.²

And yet, news outlets have just reported that McConnell killed a bill to sanction a Russian company involved in election interference only days after that same company committed to building a factory in McConnell's home state.³

And his campaign sparked another wave of bad press by putting up tombstones with the names of his Democratic opponents the day after the El Paso shooting.⁴ Meanwhile, his supporters sparked their own controversy posing with a cutout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and taking photos pretending to attack and molest her.⁵

But McConnell won't even allow a vote.⁷

Instead, the day after the shooting, his campaign put up pictures of tombstones with the names of his Democratic opponents, blatantly inciting the kind of political violence the country had just experienced.⁸

Voters in Kentucky clearly have had it with McConnell. More than 60% of Kentucky voters say "it's time for someone new" in his Senate seat, and his opponent raised a stunning $2.5 million on her first day as a candidate.⁹

McConnell knows that he's in trouble. That's why he's "fuming" about the "Moscow Mitch" nickname getting so much attention.¹⁰ And why his corporate backers are already on the air with TV ads smearing his opponents to try to save him.¹¹

SOME NOT SO GOOD NEWS...


https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/08/16/1916202/the-algorithms-that-detect-hate-speech-online-are-biased-against-black-people

The Algorithms That Detect Hate Speech Online Are Biased Against Black People (vox.com)

Posted by msmash on Friday August 16, 2019 @03:25PM from the closer-look dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report:Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are banking on developing artificial intelligence technology to help stop the spread of hateful speech on their networks. The idea is that complex algorithms that use natural language processing will flag racist or violent speech faster and better than human beings possibly can. Doing this effectively is more urgent than ever in light of recent mass shootings and violence linked to hate speech online. But two new studies show that AI trained to identify hate speech may actually end up amplifying racial bias. In one study [PDF], researchers found that leading AI models for processing hate speech were one-and-a-half times more likely to flag tweets as offensive or hateful when they were written by African Americans, and 2.2 times more likely to flag tweets written in African American English (which is commonly spoken by black people in the US). Another study [PDF] found similar widespread evidence of racial bias against black speech in five widely used academic data sets for studying hate speech that totaled around 155,800 Twitter posts.

This is in large part because what is considered offensive depends on social context. Terms that are slurs when used in some settings -- like the "n-word" or "queer" -- may not be in others. But algorithms -- and content moderators who grade the test data that teaches these algorithms how to do their job -- don't usually know the context of the comments they're reviewing. Both papers, presented at a recent prestigious annual conference for computational linguistics, show how natural language processing AI -- which is often proposed as a tool to objectively identify offensive language -- can amplify the same biases that human beings have. They also prove how the test data that feeds these algorithms have baked-in bias from the start.

SOME GOOD NEWS...


https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/19/08/20/2230218/matrix-4-officially-a-go-with-keanu-reeves-carrie-anne-moss

Matrix 4' Officially a Go With Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss (variety.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @06:50PM from the officially-happening dept.


Lana Wachowski is set to write and direct a fourth film set in the world of "The Matrix," with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity, respectively. Variety reports:Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures will produce and globally distribute the film. In addition to Wachowski, the script was also written by Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell. Wachowski is also producing with Grant Hill. Sources say the film is eyed to begin production at the top of 2020. Warner Bros. has been trying for the last of couple years to find a way to get back into "The Matrix" universe, but a hold-up over producing rights slowed the project down. Over the past couple of months, the studio saw an opportunity to ramp up development, with Reeves boasting a strong summer that included box office hits "John Wick 3"; and "Toy Story 4" and a script from Wachowski that drummed up excitement. Plot details are currently unknown, as is how the role of Morpheus will be handled, originally played by Laurence Fishburne. Some sources say the role may be recast for a younger take.Further reading: Was 'The Matrix' Part of Cinema's Last Gear Year?

Are You a ‘Testosterone’ or a ‘Dopamine?’

A brain-based personality test helps people understand themselves better and why they are attracted to certain other personality types

By

Elizabeth Bernstein

Updated Nov. 20, 2017 1:38 pm ET

Two Women Who Heard E. Jean Carroll’s Account of Being Attacked by Trump Go Public - The New York Times





https://www.instagram.com/p/Byt_dm1hzRo/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

View this post on Instagram

This piece, From Ashes, is by far my favorite piece of art I own, and it happens to be by a wonderful human Shawn over at @gendergems (who if you want cool Pride swag made by an artist in the community you should check out, hint). It is Pride weekend in PDX, and so I want to tell you why this piece means so much to me. Lupines are called lupines, derived from the Latin word for “wolf” because they were once thought to “leech” or “wolf” the soil of nutrients. But that’s a misnomer. The lupine is a legume, and has symbiotic bacteria living on its roots that fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, allowing the lupine to thrive in nutrient poor soils. After the explosion of Mt St Helens, scientists came to the ashen plain to observe what was happening. 2 years later by helicopter they found the first plant they had seen for miles. They formed a study plot around that plant 200 square yards. Within four years on that plot, there were 16 THOUSAND lupines. The return of the lupine began to enrich the soil and pave the way for an explosion of biodiversity that now inhabits the Plain. As many of you can guess, lupus also derives from the Latin word for wolf - so named because the skin lesions can resemble a wolf bite. When I learned the story of the lupine, I imbued in them a depth of symbolism. It is hard to reach out, to accept care, when we live in a culture that values “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” and sees strength in independence and “making it all on your own”; where the ableist notion that you can only be a survivor if you survive without assistance is pushed upon us in all “inspirational” narratives. Reaching out and leaning on your community are never the things glorified in these stories. Amidst that narrative that the lupine knows that if you cultivate radical interdependence, you can survive conditions so harsh that no other living being can manage. You can fix nitrogen in the soil and make it inhabitable for others. Radical interdependence isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s resilience. It’s revolution. Lean on your community this Pride season, friends. #queerartists

A post shared by 🐈🌈👔👗🍀 (@frankie_theleprechaun) on Jun 14, 2019 at 10:26pm PDT

Biological drive We think of self-actualization as a lofty goal, but research suggests it may just be another way of obeying our biological programming. Maslow's hierarchy of needs sets self-actualization apart from many of the "baser" needs, like needing food or belonging. However, research in evolutionary psychology suggests that self-actualization may not be so different after all. Instead, it may simply be another way of attaining status, ensuring that the self-actualized individual can acquire a mate and care for offspring.

Secular humanism Atheism doesn't offer much beyond non-belief, can Secular Humanism fill the gaps? More and more people are identifying as non-religious. While this can be seen as a good or a bad thing depending on your perspective, there’s one aspect to this development that isn’t ideal: the decline of communities. Twenty-two percent of millennials claim they have no friends, and many Americans are experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness. How can we regain this sense of community without having to subscribe to a religious worldview? Atheism doesn’t offer much aside from the rejection of belief, but Secular Humanism provides a different perspective. It can be defined as “A progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity." This positive, community-oriented, secular philosophy could fill the gap left behind by religion in America.

Decreasing gun deaths It's not about what guns people have. It's who has them. That's the takeaway of two 2019 studies from Boston University that used data from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control to compare the efficacy of different types of state firearms laws. In this piece, we explore why states with a combination of firearms laws see the fewest gun-related homicides — 30 percent less deaths than those without such policies.

Well-meaning immigrant  We tend to promote foreigners by broadcasting their economic and scholarly value, instead of their intrinsic humanity. There's a tendency to fight dehumanizing narratives about immigrants and refugees with stories about how much value they have to the United States, in terms of economic and academic achievements and abilities. Though these counternarratives might come from a good place, Adam Waytz doesn't believe they "really consider people in terms of human dignity."

Creative spark Sometimes you have to take the road less traveled. Creativity is not a magical force, but a discipline that's hard-won through patience and fortitude. Breaking free from your comfort zone is often required to live a more creative life. These four suggestions from psychologists and neuroscientists provide insights into injecting more creativity into your craft.

Schadenfreude The motivations behind schadenfreude are diverse — here are a few. That little bit of joy you experience when someone else fails — that's schadenfreude. It's a complex feeling, but researchers are beginning to get a clearer picture of what it is, and what spurs it. In this piece, Big Think writer Mike Colagrossi delves into the different motivations behind schadenfreude — from wanting to see justice for evildoers to feeling unabashed envy for the luminaries of society.

Metronome brain A steady timing reference is required by one of the leading theories of neuronal communication. A study of mouse neurons may have found a long-sought timing mechanism. If the finding carries over into humans, it may help explain the language of neurons. Each area of the brain may have its own metronome neurons, quietly ticking away.

Living with climate change Climate change is less politicized in poor nations — they focus on natural impacts. A recent study compared how media in 45 countries cover climate change by analyzing more than 37,000 news articles. The results indicated that poor nations tend to frame climate change around its consequences in the natural world, while rich nations tend to politicize the issue. The authors suggest that many of these poorer nations feel the consequences of climate change more saliently than richer nations, and that they simply don't have the resources or political groups to politicize the issue.

BLOWBACK

A Strange Radioactive Cloud Likely Came From Russia

BY MEREDITH FORE

In 2017 a plume of radioactive gas wafted across Europe. A study now shows it probably stemmed from a nuclear accident in southern Russia.

CHOICE WORDS

Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture

BY ADAM ROGERS

In 2012 a nongendered pronoun dropped into Swedish discourse. Today it's widely used—and it's nudging people to see the world a little differently.

BACKSTORY

How President Trump Scooped Me on a Google Story

BY NITASHA TIKU

Kevin Cernekee, a conservative firebrand inside Google, kept a low public profile. Then, WIRED's reporting propelled him to Fox News—and Trump's tweets.

LOOSE THREAD

At Twitter, It Seems No One Can Hear the Screams

BY ARIELLE PARDES

Twitter’s brass at an event this week struggled to balance the platform’s reputation for viral rage with the conversational mecca it wants to become.

SOME PERSONAL PHOTOS - A MINI GALLERY

Oh yeah, and this about the TIGERS


https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/27435865/astros-stunned-historic-upset-sportsbooks



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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you soon, Mom.

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- Days ago = 1513 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1908.25 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27 and 1907.04) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. Dropped "Talk to you tomorrow, Mom" in the sign off on 1907.04. Should have done it sooner as this feature is no longer daily.