1 May 2016

Happy May Day!  I was taught this means dancing around a phallus, but maybe it means dancing around the tree of the world, vis-a-vis Yggdrasil.

Odin sacrificed himself upon Yggdrasil and was reborn.  Segue to Jon Snow's apparent rebirth tonight.  If we can find Howland Reed, maybe we can find the truth of what happened at the tower of joy.

24 April 2016

This week I finished my physical therapy for my golfer's elbow aka epicondylitis aka manual coffee grinder-itis.  I injured myself either from: too many pushes, using a handheld manual coffee grinder since November with a weakened grip (no deadlift due to broken knee) or a new shoulder press form from Mark Rippetoe.  Hopefully I'm not too broken now and can continue to strengthen all the little connecting muscles in my forearms.

Last week also entailed a short course on continuous process improvement (CPI) aka Lean aka AFSO21 aka Total Quality Management (TQM) aka Edward Deming and Juran are alive and well.  Had the pleasure of visiting a local Trane factory and see how their CPI focused first on their associates and the ergonomics of how they worked.  Most of their employees were against improvement and assumed that it meant layoffs.  They actually hoped to hire more people and have a small team that hacks together new equipment from their scrap heap.

Now, time for GoT.  Hopefully, R+L=J.

17 April 2016

Since coming to Florida, I've been frequently thinking about what kind of survival/everyday carry (EDC)/bug out/holy-crap-here-comes-a-Hurricane kit or bag we should  have on hand.  If you haven't heard the acronym before, it means the essential tools you have on hand with you everyday, whether in pants pockets, a fanny pack or backpack, that help you get your "job" done.

Search the interwebs for EDC or survival and you'll find a spectrum ranging from "with this pack I can live in the woods for 72 hours" to "the Lord told me the end times are coming."  Basically, I want to have a bag in my car, a bag in my minivan and something else that I can take with me.  I'm not sure I want to spend hundreds of dollars on tactical gear.

Wow...these guys are serious.

I'd rather spend a few bucks on some decent sets of tools at the latest "sale" at Harbor Freight.  Thankfully, there's this:

...but most of my time is spent folding laundry and doing dishes.

Now that that's over with, time to read Warren Ellis.

11 April 2016

Just a short post to continue thinking about souls and minds.

While driving around town, I sometimes listen to Ira Glass tell me stories about This American Life. Who kinda looks like Lord Littlefinger aka Petyr Baelish aka that guy in Dark Knight Rises.

Today I listened to "For Your Reconsideration" where they discussed changing peoples minds (in regards to voting) not by showing them facts, but by appealing to their emotions.  We often want to say "HERE ARE FACTS YOU IDJIT!!  CHANGE!"  but that makes people dig in more.

What actually works is something akin to massaging the subject's amygdala to get them to feel differently about the subject (abortion, transgender individuals, deflategate, etc.).  The Heath brothers spelled this out in their book Switch.  Sinek gets into this in Start with Why (look at those glasses...) and it's what we strive for in parenting (connect the prefrontal cortex with the lizard brain so it shuts up).  

To sum up, we are meat suits controlled by cortisol, endorphins, testosterone, etc.

Back to souls...Supernatural had one of their best episodes in a looooooooooooong time on last week that we got to finally watch tonight.  It had Bobby, Rufus, that motel room, a Soul Eater and time travel!  Sam and Dean didn't complain about one or the other sacrificing themselves (or not) or each other to something, someone or some cause, and they did what they do best: hunt creepy things and save some civilians.  The back and forth between the past and the present was great and the sigil was new and not "pre-Enochian."

Phew, now I want to go get some free swingin' flannel.

10 April 2016

Today the church we attend hosted a talk from Dr. Richard Baldwin who is a history professor at Gulf Coast college.  His talk was on The Future of the Mind and started with the history of the soul.  In a less than an hour he covered:

• Nekyia in the Odyssey
• Plato's Republic and the Myth of Er
• Out of Body Experiences (OBEs)
• Turing Tests
• The Terminator
• I, Robot
• Asimo

and other dystopian future movies.  His talk summed up in that there is no empirical evidence for a soul and that there are many examples of brain damage creating "mind" damage.  

Phineas Gage sans left eye

I talked to the Dr. afterwards and talked about William Gibson, Ray Bradbury and others who think the future won't result in an AI coming to kill us, but rather a slow merging with technology.  An interesting example (spoiler alert) is the sequel to the Dune series in which a human/AI merged Duncan Idaho saves the day.  

Currently reading Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor, which is a collection of essays by the novelist.

3 April 2016

I completed the fifth assignment for my Project Management class today.  Only have the project paper to write by the twenty fifth of the month.  The paper had us review project management maturity models, with a push towards using the Project Management Institute's OPM3 model.  The literature on this was interesting as OPM3 has negative criticism due to its proprietary and closed nature.  It is currently under revision, but seems like it would be hard to get your company assessed under this model.

There are open source maturity models which I find more interesting than a proprietary model.  As I type this, I am using a Dell Inspiron 1720 with a broken backspace key and Lubuntu 15.10 installed.  I am reminded of Revolution OS, which interviewed several patriarchs of the open source community.

There: knocked posting to this old blog off my weekly to-do.

I've been inside too long and need to go chop wood. 

Fighting entropy

Stamping raw wood scraps
Deflated soccer ball gift
Polish the scratched table