feeling less well done skull creek calibogue sound England takes wicket
I was thinking about technology today.
Thinking about technology and the cloud of connections that surrounds the world.
From standard radio equipment to web technology along with rockets and satellites to cables and connections and lets not forget what it takes today to create the electricity that powers this digital world.
I was driving to work with the car radio one but with the radio plugged into my smart phone which was connected to a cell tower which allowed You Tube to play the BBC Sports Live audio stream of today’s Test Cricket Match between England and South Africa.
I was driving to work, driving over a bridge that crossed over Skull Creek, looking to the south out over Calibogue Sound listening to descriptions of events taking place in a Stadium in Manchester England and Aiden Markram, batting for South Africa pulled a hit for an easy catch to Ben Foakes.
Calibogue Sound
The commentators were talking about get an easy wicket and made the point that easy wickets made up for those times when you were ‘feeling less done well’ by the game.
I think that is why I listen to Cricket.
And considering what it takes to get the commentary on my car radio, I am grateful.
If anyone of the many links that it takes to get me the game went down, people somewhere would scramble to restore it.
Those people work hard.
Those people get a paycheck at the end of the week.
What the name of the company is that is on that paycheck, I have no idea.
If you don’t have access to the NYT (Hint Hint, when your free 3 day account from your local library expires, go back to the local library digital page and click where some nice webmaster has written ‘Go here to get another free 3 day account.’
If your local library digital page wasn’t written by a nice webmaster (there are some of us) then I apologize and here is the gist of what Mr. Kingsbury said.
Whenever I see one of those billboards that read: “Privacy. That’s iPhone,” I’m overcome by the urge to cast my own iPhone into a river. Of lava.
That’s not because the iPhone is any better or worse than other smartphones when it comes to digital privacy. (I’d take an iPhone over an Android phone in a second; I enjoy the illusion of control over my digital life as much as the next person.)
What’s infuriating is the idea that carrying around the most sophisticated tracking and monitoring device ever forged by the hand of man is consistent with any understanding of privacy. It’s not. At least not with any conception of privacy our species had pre-iPhone.
Protecting digital privacy is not in the interest of the government, and voters don’t seem to care much about privacy at all. Nor is it in the interest of tech companies, which sell user private data for a profit to advertisers. There are too many cameras, cell towers and inscrutable artificial intelligence engines in operation to live an unobserved life.
For years, privacy advocates, who foresaw the contours of the surveilled world we now live in, warned that privacy was a necessary prerequisite for democracy, human rights and a flourishing of the human spirit. We’re about to find out what happens when that privacy has all but vanished.
I think back when George Orwell wrote 1984, he only put cameras that could monitor citizens in a few strategic locations instead of having every citizen carry a monitoring device because he was striving for a level of disbelief that could be believed.
Had you painted the world of today for Mr. Orwell back in 1949 he would have said that no world could be that crazy.
sensing mutual misfortune, solace seeking … in chaos theory
incoming storm over the South Carolina Low Country
Adapted from a line of Jim Harrison’s in the Brown Dog Novella, “The Summer He Didn’t Die” (2006).
Mr. Harrison writes, “ … she felt a sense of mutual misfortune akin to looking for solace in chaos theory.”
I had to go the wikipedia for a refresher on Chaos Theory and it states: Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary scientific theory and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws, of dynamical systems, that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, that were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities.
I do not second guess Mr. Harrison, but maybe in this case, consider Chaos, or as it is in the Greek, “Abyss” of early Greek cosmology, either the primeval emptiness of the universe before things came into being or the abyss of Tartarus, the underworld.
Considering all three, underlying patterns and deterministic laws, of dynamical systems, or the primeval emptiness of the universe or the underworld, there is not much solace to find in any of them.
Nevertheless, an apt description of the times we live in.
To which I respond with Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis!
Some solace there acutally.
Though the poet responded, Quo modo? fit semper tempore pejor homo!
No Haiku For You 