It was sort of a downer of a weekend, despite the sunshine--fighting a "Roundup" reaction that made it hard to see letters on the screen, watching Serena's little blue-eyed Wonder die slowly, wondering whether he was killed when a friend's retriever took a firm grip on him before dropping him in the road or when I scooped him up out of the road. He weighed three or four pounds. His last achievement had been climbing up to the shed roof. He seemed to die slowly, keeping some signs of life all through Saturday, but never recover consciousness. He was completely dead by Sunday morning.
A theory of mine that correlates with observation: Cats who have more human-like intelligence (e.g., who learn to recognize words) will grip your fingertip between their toes when you touch their paw pads--what a friend used to call "making hands" with their paws. Wonder had never done that while living, just as he'd never snuggled into my hand while living, because he took any attention from anyone but his mother as an opportunity to start a game. He'd had all the cuddles he needed; he would let me pick him up and put him in his cage for safekeeping overnight, but otherwise he wanted to race, chase, bounce, wrestle, bite, and climb. Whenever I touched his paw to check for full rigor mortis, he gripped my fingertip in his coma. But for testosterone, he might have been as clever as Serena. We'll never know.
Climate, Something We Can Do About
As mentioned in the heated debate below, when you use a flatphone or tablet or anything "cloud-based," you're not necessarily using a huge "data center"--but you're using a "data center" and feeding the alleged demand for bigger ones where more evil data mining will be done, assuming anyone survives the damage they do to the land and the environment. Especially the warming. Do you really want all your future summers to be hotter than this one? I don't. It's not been a terribly hot summer but it's been quite hot enough for me.
The thinking is that existing "data centers," which are already using too much water and electricity and space, generating too much warming, and probably costing more jobs than they generate after the building stage, won't be enough to handle all the data Microsoft wants people to store in "the cloud," so either we turn the fertile fields of Ohio into deserts of toxic waste or we hand all our data to China.
An alternative is being intentionally ignored here. We can...just...correct a misstep, and move briskly forward, without putting any data into "the cloud." We can demand private, personal data storage on our own computers, out of reach from any other point in cyberspace, or no computers at all. That is not what Microsoft wants, nor is it what Microsoft investor Donald Trump thinks he wants, because instead of selling new computers it will revive a demand to keep on using older computers at least until the corporations roll out new ones that meet the older standards. But if we think more than five years ahead--which may be difficult at Trump's age, but should be easier for most of us--it's a total win-win. Less waste, more functional computers, we get to keep the Internet, and if China wants to let its ruling party destroy resources it badly needs to solidify its tyrannical control over its people, we let China find out for itself that that's a bad plan...and may even be able to help China pick up the pieces after its crash.
Meanwhile, over at dVerse, David Ben Alexander achieved a seadna in English.
A seadna (presumably pronounced "SHAH-dna") is one of those old Celtic verse forms that aren't usually attempted in English. It has lots of rules: For each stanza, lines have to alternate between 8 and 7 syllables, no exceptions. (Doable.) Lines 1 and 3 must rhyme with each other, as must lines 2 and 4. (Right.) The last word of lne 3 must also rhyme with an "important" word somewhere in line 4. The last syllable of line 1 must alliterate with the first stressed syllable in line 2. The last word of line 4 must alliterate with an "important" word just before it, and the more "internal rhyme" within and between lines 3 and 4, the better. (I am now officially lost.) So far, all seadnas written in English have expressed primarily the thought "Look, I did this!", but in theory someday someone may write a really good one.
Here is a bit of Bad Poetry inspired by the seadna form. As you may observe, although it's almost impossible to force English words into the correct form, if you just relax and use as much internal rhyme and alliteration as possible attempts at seadnas in English can be sort of fun...and if you ban all things "cloud-based" from your life, you can take away the basis for the claim that we need to follow China down into techno-hell.
Future summers' weather hottier,
Heavier than this summer's was,
Thirst amidst a waste of water:
First thing those flatphones can cause.
China thinks "need data chewer"?
China thought they needed Mao.
China thinks change can secure
Pure data? Who knows how?
China's junk is sinking, flaming!
Typhoon on the China Sea!
We see rich men (no names naming)
Claim the whole world's bound to be
Chained to China in pollution,
Wasting all our good green Earth;
Cry for fission, fracking, fusion,
"For pollution boosts wealth's worth."
Friends don't let friends use the flatphone!
Microsoft? Just bar the door!
Of China's bad ideas that one's
Outshone all that failed before.
There will be no cloud-based Internet for me. If you call yourself Green, there shouldn't be for you, either. Take that flatphone back to the store. See if they'll give you a refund.
Music
Harry Chapin.
Dee Dee Sharp.
NeilDiamond.
Len.
Stan Rogers.
Politics
Found on the Mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment