Author Archives: skipper

Keep it going – addendum

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When mariner reviewed his post to correct grammar and spelling, he noticed that he had zeroed in on ways to continue productivity as part of continued collaboration. Actually, productivity is a minor issue. It is collaboration that really counts.

For example, mariner used to visit a poker club every Saturday. The players were of a common stripe, each dressed in scrubby clothes, needing a shave or wearing beards and having the typical old man belly (mariner must note that by this time he was slim  though his wife wished he would shave more often). These men came to play poker but that wasn’t the real reason – the poker was atrocious because of many ‘special’ rules that made typical odds irrelevant. They came to associate with fellow humans; they needed to collaborate. Every attendee brought a simple snack of some kind, a subconscious desire to provide sustenance for the occasion.

These collaborative gatherings are quite informal and frequently available in established communities – for example, small towns or traditional neighborhood settings. They can be found at restaurants, golf courses, bowling alleys, community events and even within more structured environments like churches, Lion’s Club and VA clubs. Mariner’s town has a special women’s gathering called “The Red Hatters”, aptly descriptive. The sustenance piece is that everyone must wear a red hat.

So remember that the central goal is collaboration. If the reader also can profit, more power to them!

Ancient Mariner

Keep it going

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Mariner is older than most folks. Old enough, in fact, to look back on that time when a person suddenly becomes old – retired from career, lifelong friends and family are disappearing, maybe even die, institutions that were the core of society back in the day are not mainstream anymore, children and grandchildren are off living that life an old person remembers with melancholy.

Humans, by their nature, are born and raised to be collaborative. Each person contributes to the sustenance needed by themselves and their family and even, in these modern times, needed by God and Country. It is natural for a person to take on a role that contributes to others as well as to themselves.

But what to do when that role disappears, when that role is no longer meaningful to the day-to-day world, when the role a person played in life has become passé? The answer is to keep it going. Remember the old days when a person had to look for a job or go hungry? Remember when parents had to move to a new region and it meant having to find new friends at school? Remember when the company laid off people and they had to start over?

It’s that time again.

No one does this job for the new oldster. The oldster must make a concerted effort, often taking a year or two, to find a new way to collaborate with fellow humans. Most adjustments relate to known skills and social behavior but don’t overlook something completely new.

One of mariner’s old friends had a career working 40 years in the offices of a large corporation. When he retired, he became a carpenter specializing in refurbishing home attics. Word-of-mouth recommendations kept him busy full time.

Mariner’s wife, a career librarian and author, has established a busy day by working whenever needed at the town library, belonging to writers and readers clubs, is active in her church, maintains a visiting network with friends who go back to her childhood in the town, remaining on a daily contact basis with lifetime friends and her children, participating in art and exercise programs – and still takes care of mariner!

A couple mariner knows are retired from running a grocery store. The wife makes artistic refrigerator magnets and sells them at town fairs across the midwest, saying that the fair sales and a tax write off pay for their vacation.

For most new oldsters, collaborative participation comes from continuing the skills and behaviors of their lifetime. For example, carpenters can continue their trade by taking on smaller projects that full time contractors find unprofitable. Hobbyists who knit, make jewelry or create artwork of any kind can use their hobby by connecting with small stores, charitable organizations and selling at fairs and yard sales.

New oldsters with a background in humanities may have to be a bit more creative to find a way to use their skills. Search politics, religion, social work or presentations in retirement homes, charity organizations, community and local government organizations. History has many famous examples of old folks becoming authors – social media is waiting.

If the new oldster is sitting in a recliner watching television and scrolling games on the smartphone, get off your ass and find a new collaboration. Otherwise, depression, loneliness and boredom will be the new lifestyle.

Ancient Mariner

 

‘Tis the season, for sure

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The visiting season approaches. Be sure to have bags packed for visits and pantries full for visitors. The holiday season is upon us. Shop early, especially if the reader plans to use the US Postal Service. Mariner has lost some plants due to a three-week delivery time. The US Postal Service would appreciate it if readers would mail greeting cards instead of using internet resources – mail early! On a related matter, if the reader is using a mail-in ballot, don’t wait until the last moment.

An interesting side note: The largest group of people moving to Florida today are foreigners. Perhaps evidence that global warming isn’t just an American issue. On the other hand, with 20 wars raging around the globe, decent neighborhoods may be hard to find.

To those suffering the news broadcasts, the coverage is so iterative that almost any reader can write copy for the next broadcast. There are a very few news agencies that don’t chase the common, gossipy news. Mariner recommends ProPublica.com; other issues are growing in the nation’s large societal map.

However, one news story to which readers should be paying close attention is the disruptive activity no matter who wins the Presidential election. More and more sitting judges, both liberal and conservative, are giving fair warning. From the AP:

“Judges at Washington’s federal courthouse have punished hundreds of Capitol rioters since 2021. Before recently sentencing another to prison, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he prays Americans accept the outcome of next month’s election, but expressed concern that Donald Trump and his allies are spreading the same sort of conspiracy theories that fueled the 2021 attack.”

Mariner has read other reports that suggest organized resistance groups have been in training since the last election.

One more seasonal flavor to add: Book early and do research and training before engaging in airports, airplanes, trains and traffic jams.

Have a wonderful holiday season! Really!

Ancient Mariner

Marvelous magic of evolution

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Mariner reads several magazines and journals just for entertainment. For example, here’s an article everyone will want to read:

To achieve remarkable performances, quantum computing systems based on multiple qubits must attain high-fidelity entanglement between their underlying qubits.

( https://phys.org/news/2024-10-subtle-current-phase-potential-stable.html )

Recently mariner came upon an article about a fish named Sea Robin. It inherited the ‘robin’ word because it flies underwater with wings just like a bird. Sea Robin’s wings don’t look like fancy paddles or oars like other fish have, they look and behave just like robin wings. Isn’t it intriguing that somewhere along the long, long trail of evolution, Nature’s office of genetic distribution delivered wings to a fish!

Even more odd is that Sea Robin walks on the bottom of the ocean in a fashion similar to four legged animals on land. Even more intriguing, it hunts for and smells food with its feet. Mariner’s feet smell too, but he wouldn’t want to eat what they picked for supper. Even Sea Robin’s color scheme looks more like a bird than a fish.

Sea Robin is such an intriguing aberration in Nature’s normal but slow cell-by-cell inheritance. It isn’t that Sea Robin came along at the same time as other sea creatures who were evolving in a way that would lead them to walking on land or flying like a bird. Sea Robin has been around for 18 million years!

The Sea Robin catches one’s interest and opens the door to thinking about the larger systems of Nature – not just evolution but all the systems that are in play in all the sciences from astrophysics to the chemistry of fungi.  Sea Robin demonstrates, however, that sometimes an aberration takes evolution in a different direction.

For example, Homo sappians has been around only 300,000 years and they are wreaking havoc among all of Nature’s sciences. One can perceive that Nature is dealing with the same type of confrontation as the one that happened at the US Capitol on January 6. The sappians aren’t improving anything – they have launched Armageddon against Nature’s planet Earth.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you!

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This column from AXIOS:

“What if instead of getting presents on our birthdays, we gave gifts?

Why it matters: Acts of kindness go even further than the giver realizes.

  • Plus, studies show that spending cash on others makes us happier than spending it on ourselves.

🥳 Zoom in: Pink decided to celebrate a milestone birthday — his 60th — by giving gifts to all the people who’ve shaped his life and matter to him.

  • Recipients ranged from kids and siblings to former colleagues and old friends.

✏️ Selecting a gift was the tough part, he writes. It had to have universal utility and appeal, and it had to be cheap enough to buy in bulk.

  • He went with pencils. They were pink — a nod to his last name — and engraved with messages.
  • It’s a small gift, but it really is the thought that counts. “When you give people a gift they’re not expecting, that can make them very happy,” Julian Givi, a West Virginia University professor who studies gift-giving, told Pink.

The bottom line: Generosity takes many forms — from cooking dinner for a sick friend to donating to the local winter coats drive. Flipping birthdays is another way to give back.”

* * * * *

Mariner has always wanted his friends and family to be as happy as possible. He has collected all your birthday dates and will dutifully wait for you to have the best birthday possible by sending him your gift.

Ancient Mariner

Transition

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There are a few things about which to take note.

֎ First, read the following quote from Scientific American:

” Now researchers led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto have revealed another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms. In other words, photons can seem to exit a material before entering it.”

Briefly, it’s about light energy entering a transparent thing like glass but seems to take longer to pass through except the light energy already has exited.

Back in the old days Albert Einstein said unequivocally that it may be possible to travel into the future but it is not possible to go back in time. Is time a situational fantasy? Mariner always has thought that we live in multiple dimensions. For example, mariner fills his prescription box every week but it takes just a few days before it is empty again – or so it seems. Is AI being honest with our scientists?

֎ A new alter ego metaphor has been chosen to replace Chicken Little: Nosey Mole.

Nosey Mole lives in a large maze of tunnels. The food is good and there is little concern for catastrophe. Still, being nosy, he pops to the surface periodically to see what’s happenin’. Every time he pops up to look around, he gets whacked by the swirl of reality and returns to his tunnels. There is no great historical theme in Nosey’s life that must be feared or hoped. Life is pleasant in the tunnels.

֎ This topic is too broad to address in essay form. Mariner strongly recommends his readers make the subject of public education something of a conscious interest that induces them to learn more and do more about the state of education. There are several large issues: Public schools no longer mandate that children learn how their society works – whether its government or group behavior or issues of physiological morality.

The field of education has been set adrift for half a century. It has gone the way of unions, free speech and equal rights. In today’s world, education is confronted by extremism, technology and shifting family economics. Education is infected with obsolete teaching techniques, life threatening lack of funding and a loss of raison d’etre.

The loss of a reason to be has allowed other disciplines to invade education. Public issues like health, sexuality, classism, public funding of private schools and replacing expansive learning with extreme restrictionist objectives.

Be kind to Nosey Mole as he adapts to a role in mariner’s life.  If a reader can explain negative time, let mariner know. Do become focused on education; if our children don’t have the intellectual tools to survive during Armageddon, things will get worse than we can imagine. Think ‘Israeli-Hamas war’ in the United States. . .

Ancient Mariner

Chicken Little moved to hospice

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Afraid so. It is true that evolution is the dynamic element in all the universe – including galaxies, solar systems, life of every kind and certainly every conceivable element of existence – including the planet Earth itself – is subject to change over time. So, too, fantasy and whimsy move on as reality paves a new future.

What was important about Chicken Little’s presence was his belief that it was possible for things to behave as expected – it was just a matter of adjusting a bit to keep reality chugging along. Like the Chicken Little of children’s storybook fame, he often overreacted to what others felt was not so important as to warrant hysterical behavior.

The belief in adjusting has faded as all the world’s activity is in disarray. Human history has become a demolition derby where every conceivable idea is an effort to dismantle rational, logical behavior. Mariner, like Chicken Little, is acutely aware of the abrasion of industrial development against the evolutionary limitations not only of Homo sapiens but all of the planet’s life forms. Homo’s dangerous ability to imagine things that do not exist has been the fire that has set off an Armageddon. For casual readers who may not be familiar, mariner’s examples are any industrial development requiring chemical, environmental or any other destruction of the biosphere. For example, internal combustion engines, killing millions of species for greedy reasons, leveling quantum amounts of forest for commercial purposes, forcing every biological behavior of every species to compensate or die, etc. The result today is, of course, a destabilized, biospheric condition humans call ‘global warming’ which is most commonly observed as changes in the climate.

So mariner is interviewing several applicants to replace Chicken Little. An applicant that has caught mariner’s eye is the squirrel – especially urban squirrels. Squirrels already know that Homo sappians is a destructive creature, said and done. What concerns mariner is that the squirrel already has a bit of skepticism about it’s obsessive neighbors; Amos, another alter ego, already has more than enough skepticism.

Perhaps this is all a sign that mariner is growing old. He’s old enough to be receiving social security but young enough to see it disappear. His brain has been throwing out to trash memories that aren’t relevant anymore. Sadly, he cannot forget Lawrence Welk or Hyacinth Bucket on the British series, Keeping Up Appearances.

Suggestions for a new icon to replace Chicken Little are welcome – an icon that has come to accept Homo sappians as the failure it is but with an innocence that there is a looming Armageddon.

Ancient Mariner

Mariner apologizes for writing a negative post

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In the news today:

At Meta’s annual Connect conference last week, Zuckerberg strode onstage — wearing a t-shirt bearing the phrase aut Zuck aut nihil (“All Zuck or all nothing”) — to demonstrate the company’s prototype Orion augmented reality glasses.

The glasses resemble a strange combination of Buddy Holly, Iris Apfel and semi-opaque drive-in 3D glasses, and functioned, as Zuckerberg demonstrated in a video, exactly how he and the metaverse’s biggest boosters have promised it: cleanly laying virtual elements onto physical reality, controllable with a wrist-bound “neural interface,” with no clunky visor or joysticks required.

So help mariner, this is what the Matrix movie does.

Ancient Mariner

Liberal Arts – the Military Academy of cultural mandates

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Mariner loves metaphors. One came to mind as he pondered the last post on college education: 40% of the nation’s young people went to college. Perhaps 95% of these students studied the same textbooks and learned the same interpretation of democracy, philosophy and history. The movie ‘Matrix’ couldn’t have done it better!

Let’s test this militaristic march to a common but separate culture for college students. Let’s try some passwords to validate membership: ‘William Faulkner’, ‘Plato’, ‘Pythagoras’, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, ‘Alan Turing’, ‘Joseph Campbell’, ‘Euclid’, ‘Adam Smith’, ‘Milton Friedman’, ‘David Halberstam’. . . The reader gets the point. 40% of US citizens have an identical, if exclusive, understanding of what the values are for the American culture.

Could it be helped that colleges created a national identity that was quite exclusive in its requirements for citizenship? Somewhere along the line ‘all men are created equal’ fell by the roadside and was replaced by ‘college students know what is right’. The opinion exists that colleges stopped providing a right to education, replacing it with a right to pay to join the club.

Is this militaristic approach to education why plutocrats have attacked both labor unions and liberal arts?

Do enough wealthy citizens exist to reinvent the mores of student life? John Adams would be proud.

Is this why colleges are dropping liberal arts and creating a new syllabus called STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics)? – a strategy that can end up only  in partnership with corporations and government – socializing the citizenry be damned.

All this bouncing about, along with GPT and climate change, makes it hard for Guru to speculate the future.

Ancient Mariner

Bachelor’s degree

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One of the societal areas most affected by cultural bias and economics over the last forty years has been the prejudice associated with having a college bachelor’s degree. In a period when US inflation rose 283%, college tuition rose 1,213%. Of a personal note, mariner paid $1,000 tuition plus the cost of books for one year back in 1964; today, that year would cost him an average of $14,000 plus several fees. Further, it is a common sociological opinion that citizens without college degrees have been devalued in the value of their participation in US society. It is a common opinion among sociology professors that this devaluation is the cause for MAGA to evolve. Atlantic magazine had a recent article about this college-related phenomenon:

“Nearly 60 percent of adults ages 25 to 29 do not have a bachelor’s degree. If they have the skills to do a certain job, why should they be denied the chance solely because they lack a somewhat arbitrary paper credential?

And yet, despite its popularity, skills-based hiring (degree not needed) is a dead-end policy. If every employer in America formally stopped requiring a four-year college degree for every available position as of tomorrow, nothing much would change. Indeed, companies such as Walmart, Apple, and many others have proudly touted their removal of degree requirements in job postings, but the net effect on hiring has been very small. A recent Harvard Business School study found that when companies remove degree requirements, the share of hires with a bachelor’s degree declines by only two percentage points. Employers may not insist on a college degree, but they still prefer it.”

Mariner has chosen the term ‘white collar class’ to identify the prejudice that excludes non-degree citizens and discounts their social value. At the end of the Second World War, the Federal government saw to it that everyone had a chance to go to college; cost was heavily cut. The democratic party was the primary beneficiary to this social shift but, over the years as the advantages of and the cost needed for college-based income continued to rise, labor income did not. Today, the ‘labor’ party is infected with white collar disease (Woke) – just ask any misguided MAGA individual.

This could be an issue resolved on a level playing field except for the introduction of GPT – Generative (self-producing) Pre-trained (copycat) Transformer (can change input into a different self-determined output)¹ – A human-like ability to translate, interpret and create information without human intervention.

One can imagine the impact on an education system rooted in behavioral and textbook communication. The saying “Who needs a teacher when we have GPT?” already is a common euphemism on social media. It is a simple extension to say “Who needs departments of education?” Will ‘education’ be simple training programs used by employers targeted on corporate/government efficiency? Already, liberal arts education is disappearing as colleges are faced with the automation dilemma.

 

It is still rare but there are pre-school educators who use tabletop robots to help with behavioral education.

Mariner has no crystal with which to interpret the future of education. It is important at the least to understand how integrated and influenced education is by society. Citizens today should clearly understand the cause and effect of white collar and GPT as imbalances in cultural unity.

Ancient Mariner

PS – Mariner is having trouble with new post notices. Scroll down on the home page to see if the reader has missed any posts.

FOOTNOTE

¹GPT2 – GPT-2 was designed specifically to predict and generate the next sequence of text to follow a given sentence without human interference or knowledge of sources.

GPT3 – a sizable step up from its predecessor. It includes texts such as Wikipedia entries as well as the open-source data set Common Crawl. Notably, GPT-3 can generate computer code and improve performance in niche areas of content creation such as storytelling, aka inventing its own reality.

GPT4 – a large multimodal model (LMM), meaning it’s capable of parsing image inputs as well as text. This iteration is the most advanced GPT model, exhibiting human-level performance across a variety of benchmarks in the professional and academic realm. For comparison, GPT-3.5 scored in the bottom 10 percent of test-takers in a simulated bar exam. GPT-4 scored in the top 10 percent.