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Catching Up…On Sleep
It’s been a crazy week, but it’s over now. I still have plenty to do but crunch time is over for the moment. It’s time to set the crunch aside and stretch out on my comfy bed for a while.
A Man With A Plan
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort. ~Paul J. Meyer
| So, the plan for this weekend is to just rest up. I’ve been pushing extra-hard and my recent birthday is a tangible reminder that… |
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Needless to say, one can only keep the afterburners on so long before running out of fuel.
I’m definitely not twenty-something anymore and the all-nighters have taken a toll. Despite the gains I’ve made, there’s only so much good to be harvested from keeping my nose to the proverbial grindstone. |
| So, the trick is to spend a bit less effort by putting a bit more effort into planning my, well, efforts.
The old chestnut about measuring twice and cutting once is an excellent blueprint for how I’m approaching my outstanding tasks for next week. |
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One of the big buzzwords in business and in manufacturing particularly is kaizen.
This principle of continuous improvement through incremental implementation of beneficial actions is proven even if it is often misused or pointlessly bandied about. |
| The point is that I have a crapton of stuff to do (both at work and on personal projects) and I certainly can’t count on more time becoming available on its own.
This is where planning comes in. I’ve been using Remember The Milk for years now to keep track of my regular activities. It helps me keep up with my schedule of work meetings, bills, medical appointments and so forth. |
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It’s been ages since I’ve written a spec, but I’ve got a project on my hands that requires this level of detail.
Trying to do this thing on the fly is giving me quite a headache and nobody needs that. I don’t need to do this often, but this one is pretty complex and I believe it merits a full spec and project plan. |
| So, that’s the plan for one item.
I don’t have just one item on my plate, though. As I’ve already said, I’ve got a 💩💩💩 crapton 💩💩💩 of work to do at work and for my own goals. I started, a while back, to redesign my upcoming novel using the ❄️ Snowflake Method ❄️. |
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Unfortunately, I got busy with programming work and haven’t had a chance to finish that snwowflake plot structure. So, hopefully, by planning and executing work at my job more efficiently, I’ll buy myself some time to get back to non-job activities. Guess we’ll see… |
The Future Is A Bunch Of 💩
Anybody who is a Star Trek fan has seen a vision of a better future. While the details of the Trek milieu are rooted in a socialist fantasy, the world depicted in the various series has inspired so many technological innovations.
Sadly, they envision a galaxy based on the oh-so-annoying John Lennon song, Imagine.
Yeah, it seems all sweet and lovely, but “Imagine there’s no countries” or “And no religion too“? So, what’s the matter with people freely associating according to common beliefs or cultural heritage? The Federation is a kind of “country” in space and their dedication to the Prime Directive can be seen as a religious tenet.
How about “Imagine no possessions“? Wow, really? Didn’t the Trek characters all have their own quarters with their own décor? Wouldn’t having no possessions mean that anybody could just arbitrarily help themselves to my prescription medications? Could someone just walk into John and Yoko’s flat and walk off with his shoes or eat all the food in his fridge? Really?
“No need for greed or hunger“? Okay, greed is a bad word. Nobody likes greed, but given the rest of the lyrics, he’s not really talking about greed in the sense of being insatiably avaricious at the expense of everyone else. In this fluffy socialist mindset, greed would be the basic desire to have something. Well, if you don’t have posessions and you can just take a shirt that appeals to you from someone else’s closet, doesn’t that make you greedy? Should we just all sit around naked and not want anything ever? As for hunger, sorry but that’s a biological function. We need to eat. Somebody needs to grow the food, ship it somewhere to be packaged, package it, deliver those packages to a store for purchase. Even if you take out the last few steps and just grow it yourself, you still need to grow your food because you’ll always need to eat some food. You just do. How does some sappy hippie song take away the need to eat? Sure, he was talking about the scarcity-driven hunger that plagues so many places around the world, but the point remains. How do you stop hunger when people will always need to eat?
As for “Imagine all the people / Living for today” Wow, seriously? No planning for tomorrow? No keeping an eye on the weather, near-Earth asteroids, volcanic activity, invasive species, planned agriculture? Sure, it’s all well and good if you’re a millionaire musician living a “socialist” fantasy life with the ho who broke up the band that made you a millionaire and your marriage besides, but it doesn’t really work well for the average citizen of actual socialist or communist-run countries.
Honestly, it’s just stupid and the song is pretty whiny.
Despite the socialist underpinnings of Roddenberry’s imagined future, Star Trek has actually taught us that wanting more, without it being at the expense of others, can take us boldly into the future.
It’s optimism and boundless curiosity that shape the future, if we can just get the idiotic naysayers to stand aside and let the creative geniuses among us do the good work of making life better for the rest of us.
Star Trek inspired cell phones, floppy disks, talking computers and so much more. A lot of the technology being developed has been inspired by things depicted in this franchise.
But it’s not the sole driver of innovation. Here’s a green, or you might say brown, technology initiative that addresses a number of needs together to create a beneficial synergy.
Turning Human Waste into Renewable Energy?
The big problem with the current push to EV’s is that the technology isn’t ready yet. It soon will be, but it’s not there yet. Here are some promising approaches to addressing some of the current problems with an EV society.
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These are some promising approaches to using pervasive ecological factors. Solar is great but there’s this thing called night. Wind is great but it doesn’t always blow. Ocean tides and the perpetual furnace at the center of our planet are not stop-and-go resources.
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All the green meanies are screeching to high heaven that the sky is falling and climate change is irreversible and we’ve already destroyed our planet with SUVs and cow farts.
Approaching life with a scarcity mindset is a recipe for perpetual panic. Problem is, we don’t have scarcity. We have abundance that we don’t always know how to maintain properly.
75% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water of some kind. 98% of that is salt water which is not potable. You’d think that people in coastal regions would have invested more effort in creating desalination technology to harvest drinking water from this ubiquitous resource.
| Well, the Israelis have and here’s how they’re faring with their efforts.
Amazing how prioritizing the proper stewardship of a given resource can lead to a sustainable use without raping the source. No strip-mining required. You don’t have to suck the Mediterranean Sea dry to hydrate Israel. It’s local, sustainable use of a plentiful resource that provides good jobs for well-educated people. |
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The projects depicted in this documentary are proof posiive that even centuries or millennia of misuse and bad practices can be reversed in a fairly short period of time.
The abundance of microorganisms in this planet’s soil can quickly turn a denuded piece of land into a lush garden in as short as 3 years with proper stewardship, proper education and an actual concern for the environment. |
The problem is that a lot of our “environmentalists” are not even concerned with the environment. It’s just a talking point for them to level hate at their fellow person, flogging them with climate sins.
Get over yourself already. Either propose a viable solution or STFU.
There are people who are not only proposing solutions but actually enacting them. Here are some videos on how farming can not only become more sustainable and cruelty-free, but also leave more green spaces open for the kind of environmental replenishment depicted in the regreening documentary above.
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Vertical farming and lab-grown meat products could be produced locally to provide high-value food to cities and other highly residential areas.
Fortunately, I live out in farm country. I can drive down the street and stop at any number of farm stands to buy fresh produce during the growing season. Those stands are closed for the winter, but they’re open and well-stocked most of the rest of the time. So, even for me in the midst of all these farms, lab-grown meat and vertically farmed produce would be beneficial when certain foodstuffs aren’t in season.
People gotta eat, Mr. Lennon. There can only be “no hunger” if somebody’s taking the time to grow it somewhere, somehow.
| Another thing that the “environmentalists” are undercutting but should definitely not be is nuclear energy.
Waa-waa-waa, nuclear waste, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima… Okay, so there’s a solution to nuclear waste that would actually make it a valuable resource but that would require people to actually see the possibilities instead of being whinging bitches. Being a whinging bitch is so much easier for most people. I wonder how we could harvest that energy because there’s plenty of it… |
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One of the complaints against nuclear energy is that the materials involved can be enriched to make nuclear weapons.
Sorry to say, but a stick a rock and a vine can become a war hammer in a few easy steps. Just because people can put things to a bad use doesn’t preclude a number of good uses. If we could all stop being whiny bitches for a moment and look at things through the lens of optimism and abundance, we might realize we’re in much better shape than the “environmentalists” would have us believe. |
We’ve been through significantly worse ecological disasters and yet, the planet and the human species are still here. Take the following two disasters in consideration.
Life during these periods genuinely sucked. Not only did the environmental calamities far exceed the circumstances we’re experiencing today but they also did not have the benefit of our current scientific knowledge. They had to play this stuff by ear and a lot of people died due to sheer ignorance, lack of mobility and a lack of alternatives.
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Today, it’s no longer the case. We have solutions to most of the issues the “environmentalists” like to rail on about. We know about aeroponics, hydroponics, lab-grown meats, textured vegetable proteins, macrobiotic nutrition and other alternatives to provide survival foodstuffs in the event of disaster.
When SHTF back then, the alternative was to hunker down in a cave or undergo a mass migration in search of farmland that hasn’t been flooded, reduced to a desert or otherwise ecologically decimated. Now, we have proven techniques for replenishing the land and farming in a controlled enclosure.
As Peter Diamandas points out in his TED Talk below, back in the late 1800’s the King of Siam was presented with aluminum utensils. At that time, this was an extreme luxury because aluminum was prohibitively expensive to produce. Now, we put leftovers and volumes of soda in it so we can crunch it up and throw it away.
What is scarce today may be as ubiquitous as air tomorrow, particularly if people like the creatives in these videos are planning for a better tomorrow instead of “Living for today” like a certain ex-Beatle would have us do.
“Imagine” not being a self-absorbed hippie millionaire and actually doing something productive for the betterment of your society. That’s the promise of Star Trek, friends. Not fantasy socialism or environmentalist whinging, but actually contributing to the abundance mindset that makes the future bright instead of blight.
Abundance is our future | Peter Diamandis
Permissible
When artists make art, they shouldn’t question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another. ~Sol LeWitt
I’ve seen pictures of Sol’s art. He didn’t need to ask permission, necessarily, but I think he’d have benefitted from questioning whether or not something was necessary.
Doing stuff just because you can is very liberating to the doer but might be pretty off-putting to a lot of other people.
It actually depends on your goal.
Art for art’s sake can be a personal compulsion. Some people are simply driven to create.
That’s fine. You can doodle on your notebook. You can paint cute little decorations on your furniture, your cabinet doors, rocks in your front yard, whatever. You can tattoo yourself from head to toe. You do you.
In many cases, people are trying to make art for public consumption. That’s when you need to question whether or not something is permissible.
If you’re sculpting a statue for a public memorial, do you put a fig leaf over the guy’s genitalia or do you construct a Mannekin-Pis?
If you’re writing a book about social issues, do you write something in the vein of a Dickensian social dissertation or something like Nabokov’s Lolita?
Permissible actually varies by audience. Back in the 70s, a lot of what was popular at the time is actually nauseating now. I mean, orange couches and daisies? Please…
If you hope to write a classic, you need to focus on shared human experience rather than what’s trending. You might make a mint in the short term but sales will fall off as quickly as the trend you’re writing to.
Personally, I just need to write something other than VBA code right now. All work and no play makes Rob an irritable sod…
That’s it for today. Notice the difference between when I’m rushed and sleep-deprived and a day like today.