The New World of Lonnie Mandigo

Shopping as activism isn't much different than showing up for a protest. Your individual contribution is pretty small. It's only really effective in aggregate. This doesn't imply that you shouldn't be part of the aggregate—just don't overrate your personal influence. So why bother?

Inspired by a fascinating conversation with Jim over coffee, I continued to explore the topic of qualia with Gemini. The following paper is the result of our collaboration.

It's an interesting question given humanity's propensity for shortsighted and self-destructive decision making.  Glibly, the answer is no.  It's not worth saving and should get exactly what it deserves.  It is not earning its way as a responsible contributor to the universe.   That, of course, begs the question of what does the universe want? Other than a few fantasies that we've crafted it's unclear. We have values as humans such as order, beauty, and joy.  Science is the objective pursuit of discovering order in the universe.  Beauty straddles a line between the objective and subjective.  Much of what is considered to be beautiful are objective observations with subjective assessments.  Joy is entirely subjective and tends to be generated by the orderly and beautiful. These are potential self-centered reasons for humans to continue to exist, but in an of themselves don't answer the question of what the universe wants. What does the universe...

Gratitude I'm extremely grateful for the many bright, interesting, and engaged people that I've had the opportunity to meet and interact with.  This alone makes life worth living. Geek I fired up a Minecraft server several months ago.  Mostly to have something to do with my grandkids.  They connect once in awhile, but not regularly.  I was telling some friends about it the other day and at least one of them is getting into it.  Minecraft is fun, but being able to share a world is MUCH more fun. The downside was discovering that my implementation had some serious performance problems. I had been running a vanilla Minecraft server on a moderately powered box with 8Gb of memory.  It was chronically several thousand ticks behind.  This created some really unfortunate behaviors. Last night I bit the bullet and replaced the vanilla Minecraft server with Paper .  It appears to be running much better, but we'll see over time. Ponder For quite awhile I've ...