Rubenerd

This was originally written on Tuesday, but I forgot to commit it!

I had a brief I’m living in the future moment this morning. I didn’t get a photo in the peak hour crush of people, but I saw a scrolling advertisement on the train platform for United Airlines:

Dallas, gateway to your world.

This is the only era in history where that could even be close to conceivable to a Sydneysider, let alone plausible. Wolfram Alpha reports Dallas being 13,818 km away. It’s not quite on the exact other side of the planet, but it’s striking distance. It’s so far away, it’s almost a day behind; another mind bender generations not that removed from us would not have had to contend with.

We spend so much of our lives in our own little bubble, whether it be a city or a rural town. It’s everything to us. But in between there are these vast expanses of space. If we could walk on water, it would take us years to cross that distance.

That’s not to say the future is comfortable; Clara and I flew to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to New York and Philadelphia in 2016, and it was a long flight! But again, faster than any other method right now.

This was originally written on Tuesday, but I forgot to commit it!

I had my third migraine of the year on the weekend. They don’t happen as frequently as they did in my teens, but they’re just as incapacitating. As I wrote in February, in the context of codeine becoming prescription only in Australia for what can only be described as tenous reasons:

But a few times a year I’m blinded with kaleidoscope imagery — less beautiful than it sounds — then such pain behind my eyes I have to close the curtains and sit still in darkness for hours lest I throw up.

I realised though, I haven’t ever approached the hive mind for coping tips. For those of you reading my blog, thank you! And secondly, if you suffer migraines, what coping tips do you use? I’d be keen to hear and share.

Lately I’ve found meditating helps, along with the aforementioned codeine and some Tiger Balm. Sashin would know better than anyone that medidating is actually very difficult, and I still have a very long way to go. But forcing yourself into that state of mind is a welcome respite.

I got this worrying email from Richard Haynes this morning:

More than half of Atheist Nexus’s funding is now gone. For ten years, most of our expenses have been paid by purchases made through our Amazon Associates link. Unfortunately, Amazon has changed their policies and now this source of income is gone.

In 2019, Atheist Nexus turns ten-years-old, and we continue to be one of the few online havens for those fearing “coming out” as nonbelievers. We have more than 32,000 members, 1100+ specialized groups, and a 17,000+ member Facebook group. We do all of this on a shoestring budget and have not needed to do a fundraiser for a couple of years.

If you are able, please consider helping us out. You can help by upgrading your Nexus membership, and/or by giving to this Gofundme campaign.

I was lucky to grow up in a supportive, deistic/agnostic family. Coming out as an atheist or nonbeliever can be a terrifying experience, from family ostracisation to threats of violence depending on where you are and the religion you’re withdrawing from. Having a support network is absolutely critical.

If you have a spare few bucks, please consider throwing it their way. The entire community there is supportive and lovely, it would be an incredible shame to lose this resource for people in need.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

31:11 – Recognising two distinct trends on the programme of late, obsessive spreadsheeting, resenting new computer hardware, more thoughts around working from coffee shops instead of home/work, the computer dock and concept pioneered by the late OQO, and some speaking in between the coughs! Feedback from Chad Bowers and Dave on Onsug.com.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released November 2018 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

It’s Music Monday time again! Each Monday I relieve what I used to do for my university’s anime society by sharing a song I love and writing a brief description.

While we’re doing Japanese stuff, Ray is my favourite song by my favourite Japanese band, the delightfully named Bump of Chicken.

They also did a version with Hatsune Miku which was adorable, but the original is still the best. It’s light and happy, and the visuals are just beautiful. I may also have a mancrush all of them.

Today marks one hundred years since the end of World War I. Lest we forget.

homebrew-cask-versions lets you install previous or beta versions of popular GUI tools that aren’t in mainline homebrew cask.

$ brew tap homebrew/cask-versions
$ brew cask install 1password6

Browsing the casks in the repo, I can see they have the latest testing builds for Firefox, older versions of VMware Fusion, and other good stuff.

A local university started putting up these banner advertisements. The example above reads “Want better answers? Ask bigger questions” with cliché stock photos. Empty marketing speak like that sounds profound superficially, but it’s really devoid of any meaning.

My test for such ads is to read it backwards to see if it makes sense. In this case, all the banners this university has put up do!

For example, the above could be flipped as “Want better questions? Give bigger answers.” I’m sure university students would be willing to engage with interesting questions if they knew they’d receive compelling answers from professors.

The other one down the street reads “Be a voice. Not an echo.” This is just flat out wrong; we need to defer to experts and echo their research. Nobody can be an expert at everything, except cable TV news pundits. A major reason why the west is in a mess is precicely because swaths of the population think scientists and experts are elites and can’t be trusted. Mr Orange and Scott Morrison are the inevitable conclusion of thinking being a voice is always more important.

But then, employing empty platitudes is easier than explaining why your university is better.

Never read comments. But if you do, these are the most common responses to articles about work automation:

1. Increased automation at the expense of workers is good or inevitable, because workers have priced themselves out of the market with negotiations, unions, or minimum wages.

2. Lost jobs will be made up for in other industries.

3. Welfare support, or a universal basic income, will make people lazy.

It seems to me you can’t hold these views concurrently. Not everyone losing a job to automation will be able to work building or maintaining robots. And you can’t blame people for needing income assistance if work is disappearing. Well, you can, but it’s entirely unproductive.

I wish this could be discussed maturely – like so many things – without it automatically devolving into a living example of Poe’s Law, too.

Our new colleague shared this on our internal chat. 👌

A FreeBSD or FreeNAS storage device with ZFS would be among the few exceptions to the rule here.