Backyard Trail

March 31, 2018
Shale Station
Shale Station

For those that haven’t been following along on Facebook and elsewhere, Susie and I bought a place overlooking Center Hill Lake last year. Right now it’s our weekend getaway but eventually, hopefully within a couple years, it’ll be our permanent home. The house sits on a about 1.25 acres of very steeply sloped land with three quarters of it being woodland. The northeast portion is bounded by property owned by the Army Corps of Engineers which runs down to a cove on the lake.

Trail Guide
Trail Guide (red = very steep!)

Since we’ve been here I’ve had a notion that I’d eventually like to create a trail down to the bottom of our property. Originally that was going to be something to pick at after taking care of a million other more important projects “up top”. Part of that was trying to de-bramble / vine a section towards the top where the previous owner had opened up a view by cutting down a bunch of trees and leaving them where they fell. Once I started to get that cleared away I found myself thinking more and more about a trail.

Little sweet betsy (Trillium cuneatum)
Little sweet betsy (Trillium cuneatum)

Another thing that happened was learning a bit more about the geology and topography of this area of Tennessee, especially as I found myself on Chuck Sutherland’s web site over and over again. Chuck has some pretty amazing maps which got me wondering if I might be able to use the GIS data from the State of Tennessee to create my own map which I could then use to guide the path my trail might take. After discovering QGIS I was able to do just that. The trail doesn’t follow the path I drew up exactly, but it ended up being pretty close.

Blue phlox (Phlox divaricata)
Blue phlox (Phlox divaricata)

Armed with my map, hoe, bowsaw, and pruner I spent the last few weekends making my way down the hill. As I did I started to notice the wide variety of flora down there. Spring having arrived probably made this much more noticeable, but as I encountered each interesting new plant I’d take a picture and look it up later. A buddy of mine was visiting a couple weekends back and showed me an app he uses to identify plants called PictureThis. PictureThis makes plant identification so much easier!

Well, yesterday I finished the trail! Okay, there are several places that could use a little more work. Some old logs that it would be nice to cut through, some widening, and, if my wife has anything to say about it, some sections that are still too steep that need to be de-steepened. So maybe not finished finished but you’re about 100 times less likely to break a leg trying to get to the bottom now.

This morning I took all the photos that I made as I was creating the path and threw them in an album on flickr. It includes all my best guesses of the plants I found along the way. And a couple other things I found along the way. Now to start thinking about the 2 or 3 spur trails I’m thinking I might need.

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MarsEdit 4

March 30, 2018

Finally got around to updating to MarsEdit 4 this morning. Not that the update isn’t worth it, rather I’m just really good at procrastinating. In fact I plan to try and get even better at procrastinating one day!

I’ve been using MarsEdit to help compose these posts since forever it seems like. It’s a great piece of software maintained by a great software developer, Daniel Jalkut. Daniel’s continued to work to improve MarsEdit over the years and is very responsive to feedback. If you do any kind of blogging I encourage you to give it a look. You can try it for free by following the download link at https://red-sweater.com/marsedit/.

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Coming Home

March 27, 2018

The whole Facebook / Cambridge Analytica thing has been on my mind a bit lately. Really all of social media. Apart from these privacy issues, Twitter and Facebook seem to have become the place to visit if you want to learn who’s horrible for having / not having a particular belief, gender, skin color, etc. I just want to know how everyone’s doing, what’s going on in their world, maybe something to make me smile. But it generally takes less than 10 minutes before I stumble across something aggravating. And more often than not I really want to respond but I know it’s not going to help. Generally just the opposite. So I turn away and hope I don’t spend the rest of the day contemplating what my response would have been if I’d allow myself to post one.

There’s still good stuff on Twitter and Facebook, if I can manage to skim past those posts that leave a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve been reluctant to give up on them completely since it’s an easy way to communicate with friends and family. But, given that I can go days without checking in, I can miss out on a lot that’s going on. Facebook is particularly annoying since it wants to organize your timeline according to a seemingly arbitrary set of rules instead of just showing me what’s happened since I last visited. I’m sure there is plenty of news that I miss completely if Facebook feels it’s not important enough to appear in my timeline.

And then there’s all the history. I joined Twitter in January of 2007 and Facebook in July of 2007. Over ten years worth of memories scattered across these sites that I’d like to hold onto. I can (and have) downloaded archives of my Facebook and Twitter history so I could make it available elsewhere but I’d lose a bit of context since I’d not have links to those that participated in those conversations over the years. That would be a bummer. So anyway I’ve not done anything about the situation other than slowly withdrawal from participating in most forms of communication the internet.

I found myself thinking about all these things again this morning and wondering why it is I don’t simply revert to my roots? That is, posting here on my poor neglected blog. Here I’m in control of my data, for the most part. I don’t have to worry about who’s tracking my activity and I don’t have to be bombarded with the divisiveness I find elsewhere unless it’s self-inflicted. And blogging is how I came to know so many of the people I’m now friends with on Facebook and Twitter. There certainly a lot less friction to firing off a quick post to Twitter or Facebook, but then I’ve also been trained to cram my thoughts into 140 characters or less. That doesn’t allow for a lot of nuance.

If I look back at the time before social media (2003 – 2007) I averaged about 75 posts a year. From 2008 on that drops to 10 posts a year. Since 2015 I’ve posted here 10 times. With zero posts in 2016. It’s a real shame. Yeah there’s a plenty of silly stuff that I’ve posted here over the years, but there’s a few thoughtful pieces as well. And maybe if I come back home that thoughtfulness will return.

I know I’ve threatened to revive this site on more than one occasion in the past, so I’m hesitant to make any predictions. But either I come back here or I keep backing away from the internet in general and I think I’d rather give the former a try first.

As for the fate of my Twitter and Facebook accounts, that remains up in the air. I can’t quite bring myself to delete them yet. Maybe things will get better there somehow.

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Just When I Thought I Was Out…

January 15, 2018

In November of 2013 I attended a BarCamp Nashville session presented by Luke Stokes on Bitcoin. I’d certainly heard of Bitcoin at that point but really didn’t know much about it. I was intrigued as I left the session but didn’t follow up for several weeks. When Luke gave his presentation Bitcoin was trading at around $200. Three weeks later it was at $700. That may have had something to do with my sudden compulsion to learn more. In the meantime I made various tiny purchases over the next couple months to play with as I educated myself on how exactly Bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general, worked.

I found Satoshi’s solution to the problem of tracking ownership of a digital asset, the blockchain, to be incredibly interesting. As I learned more I wanted some practical experience mining Bitcoin but even at that time it required specialized hardware to be viable so I turned my attention to Scrypt based currencies, like Litecoin, which could be mined using a reasonably current GPU. It was also around this time that Dogecoin made it’s debut. I loved it and the community which grew up around it and I even made a few submissions to the Dogecoin client.

I mined tiny amounts of assorted coins in the first half 2014. Mostly Dogecoin and Litecoin, which all got converted to Bitcoin and transferred to Coinbase. Once I clawed my way up to a single Bitcoin I stopped mining as my interest, and belief in crypto started to waver. Continue reading →

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Truth

October 19, 2017

Just about every day I wake up and wonder how it is that the world seems so broken. Maybe it’s just that I’m paying more attention and it’s always been broken. I know that’s true to a certain extent but it’s hard to look at current events and dismiss all the craziness as business as usual. But what to do about it? Do I just try shutter myself away from any news of whats going on outside the little patch of earth I inhabit? It’s hard for me to see a problem and try to keep myself from trying to find a solution. Though “fixing the world” seems like it might be a lot of work so I’ve tried my best to stop thinking about it.

It’s not really working.

Inevitably when I’m unable to stop myself wondering how we got here and how to make it better I next ask myself, okay, what exactly is broken? Can’t very well fix something until you know what the problem is. There are many but the one that really gnaws at me is our inability to agree on what is fact and what is fiction. There is seemingly no source that all can agree is an unbiased repository of truth.

When the internet was shiny and new, the naive among us, had high hopes that it would bring the world closer together. Here for everyone was the sum total of all human knowledge at our fingertips. With a snap of our fingers we could summon forth a wealth of expertise on any topic one could conceive of. The sad truth is that the internet is not just the sum total of all human knowledge but rather the sum total of all human thought. And humans have had some pretty bizarre thoughts. For every almost “fact” you can find someone on the internet willing to refute it. Once upon a time I thought sites like Snopes or PolitiFact would save us. Whenever I’d see someone suggesting things like Mark Zuckerberg was going to charging for Facebook unless you made some nonsense post, I’d try to gently nudge the misguided to a Snopes article refuting these claims. That generally worked though they might not be thrilled to discover they’ve been dupped. With more serious matters this doesn’t work so well. I personally believe that the people that run these sites do so for, generally, altruistic reasons. I’m sure there are biases but I have to believe their exist people that are more concerned with the truth and not just proving themselves right. At least I am. I don’t want to be wrong but I especially don’t want to be willfully ignorant. Still, on more that one occasion, I’ve seen people explain that Snopes is just a husband and wife googling for answers and jotting down whatever they find. The same people claim without a hint of irony, that it must be true because they googled it. And, with almost no effort, you can learn about PolitiFact’s bias against the right. Just google PolitiFact bias. And what reasonable person wouldn’t agree that random people are the internet are the more credible than documented sources. Who are these sources and how can we trust them!?

I want to believe that people could be convinced that these sorts of sites aren’t an evil conspiracy by “the left” to brainwash us into believing… I don’t know, whatever agenda it is they believe fact checking sites are trying to push. But then I consider that the Flat Earth Society has hundreds of members. Hundreds of years of physical and scientific evidence are all dismissed as a big conspiracy for… reasons. I have no idea. There are even more that believe we never landed on the moon and, despite overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change is real, there are many many people that refuse to accept this interpretation of the evidence.

Before the internet these fabrications and fringe beliefs had a tougher time taking root. If I decided that we’re all living in a computer simulation and went around to friends and family expressing this belief they’d (hopefully) tell me that I should seek help. I haven’t googled this but I bet if I did I could find plenty of people on the internet 100% convinced this is the truth. There is probably a Matrix society for like minded individuals. So how do we fix that? Is it even fixable or are humans hard wired to be skeptical of any challenge to any deeply held belief? We could make a 100 more Snopes and end up with thousands more theories on how and why there conclusions are biased.

It’s all incredibly frustrating to me and I don’t see a quick fix. We’re not going to be able to address the real problems in the world until we reach a point where we can mostly agree on reality itself and see what the real problems are. It feel cuckoo to even have to type that out but there it is. So how do we get to that point? What would it take to create a source of knowledge that wouldn’t immediately be dismissed as a tool of the left or the right? Is such a thing even possible in society as it exists today?

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