Rolandt

We went downtown today to see the recently opened extension to the main public library. There is a new top floor with an large public space, currently hosting an exhibit about the changing city and above that a rooftop area that is mostly paved but with some planting (shown above).

I have also uploaded a set of photos to my flickr stream which I am linking to below

This poster is displayed in the main lobby. It is not meant to be taken literally.

As you can see it is not that hard to find your way around the new 9th floor.

There are two open patios on the 8th floor, also accessible from new exterior stairs as well as the internal escalators, elevators and stairs.

There is also a planted area that is not open to the public on the 9th floor as is the green roof above it.

The whole thing is all very nicely presented but I have to confess a feeling of being underwhelmed. The new space did get quite a lot of notice in the media, so I suppose I was expecting something more.

Movable tables and chairs are a very good idea. Maybe as the plantings grow and more people start to use the space, things will look better. No doubt sunshine will help but frankly the view is unimpressive. Not much of our glorious setting is visible from here – just the towers and the roof of the stadium

 

What if we had another 9/11, and nothing happened?

Living in New York City, the one fantasy sport that everybody plays is real estate; we all like to imagine what it would be like to be able to afford to buy a place. And sometime over the last year or two, I realized that, even if I won the lottery and could afford to buy a home in my preferred neighborhood (the Lower East Side), I probably wouldn’t get one in most of the places I'd want to live. Because I think over the 30-year term of that mortgage, our neighborhood will be significantly destabilized by climate change.

It was a bit of a shock for me to come to this realization, because the logic is extremely straightforward, but I hadn’t really considered the implications at that visceral level. I hadn't yet let the science change my daydreaming about an HGTV future. And as I’ve talked about that reality to more and more people in my circle of friends, a curious pattern has emerged. They’ve all found the rationale around the impacts of climate change unimpeachable, but nearly all are very reluctant to embrace the conclusion that this logic inevitably yields.

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In our neighborhood, it’s easy to see the impacts of increasingly-powerful storms. We were hit hard by Sandy, with power outages for days or weeks, and severe disruptions for months. I still see buildings with the high-water mark outlined on them, and I still remember which places stayed open to serve people in those incredibly dark nights when we didn't even have street lights to show the way. Any day now, they’ll be shutting down the most essential subway line in our neighborhood for massive tunnel repairs that are expected to take years to complete. This is all still recovery from a storm that most of the country has already forgotten about, that the popular memory remembers as "not as bad as they thought it was going to be".

But if you talk to transit advocates or city council members or the state officials responsible for funding such repairs (and I do), many of them predicate their argument for repairing our subway tunnel on the idea that we’ll be “fixing the problem”. We've got to fix a subway tunnel, right? It’s okay to amortize the cost of repairs to this tunnel over years or decades because then we’ll be in good shape, right?

I don’t think so.

We’re still acting like today, and the recent past, is an aberration, and the future will involve things "returning to normal". We're all making assumptions about when New York City will be hit again by another Sandy-scale storm. Most infrastructure investments are still being made with an assumed “storm of the century” mindset, where it’ll be decades until we confront this kind of disruption again. But it's far more likely, given that the rate of climate change is accelerating, that we’ll see such disruption again within a few years. The big storms we confront in the coming decades won’t always be on the scale of Sandy, but they will hit with far more energy and impact and frequency.

And when they do, not only will not be ready, we’ll be nowhere near prepared for the rebuilding and reinvestment that it will take to recover. We'll have spent our time and resources on investments that treat extreme climate disruption as the exception, instead of the norm.

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We're Bad At This

Much has been written in recent years about how human societies are bad at catching on to creeping threats, as opposed to acute dangers. Western societies in particular seem vulnerable to this, and America at this specific moment seems oriented toward willfully ignoring any long-term trends or obvious threats, in favor of conjuring up imagined dangers. There’s a long strain of anti-intellectualism and short-term profiteering that has led to this point, but the years of effort in undermining science and introducing doubt into the existence of scientific consensus have produced an awful, if inevitable, outcome. Many of our political leaders in power seem shockingly comfortable with encouraging a death cult amongst their followers; this began with normalizing violence but easily evolves into an environment where existential threats are treated as exciting opportunities for a rapturous reckoning, rather than a threat to everyone.

In the past, we at least were able to treat galvanizing moments of obvious threats as a catalyst for change. For example, we reacted in the extreme to the shock and tragedy of 9/11. Unfortunately, our thoughtless reaction has delivered Bin Laden an almost total victory by embracing nearly every costly, self-defeating tactic possible. But even in losing the war on terror we certainly demonstrated that we were able to use the death of thousands as a motivation to make huge, costly, sweeping changes in society. It’s even possible to imagine what might have happened if we’d responded to the shock of 9/11 with an urgent effort to make positive changes instead of destructive ones.

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This time, though, we had a catastrophe with a far higher death toll, and far higher economic toll, than 9/11, and the regime in power decided to act as if nothing had happened. Puerto Rico's awful fate under Maria was rendered even more horrific by a political response that began with indifference and then degenerated into overt denial. We can almost imagine Trump staring at the smouldering piles of rubble where the Twin Towers had stood, and not merely crowing about how his buildings had moved up in the list of tallest skyscrapers, but actively denying that anyone had died in the World Trade Center at all. Now imagine the rest of us, knowing there was going to be another 9/11 every few years, pretending that it wasn't going to be us who gets targeted next.

NYC Flood Hazard Mapper

Beyond Despair

I know it doesn't sound like it, but I'm an optimist. The reason I love technology and popular culture so much is because I never stop being inspired by what humans create. But I try to be pretty good at seeing where society is heading, and judging where our tastes and trends will take us over time. Usually, that just requires looking at patterns of the past, and learning from that history. This time, I don't think that works.

There isn't going to be a last-minute reprieve on climate that lets us keep living in the world we used to have.

Today's political environment demands that scientists still talk about the steps it takes to limit global temperate increase to 1.5° C. That is not going to happen. I don't even think we're going to limit the increase to 2°C within my lifetime. I believe the millions of climate-chased refugees around the world today will be joined by tens of millions more tomorrow. I believe the increasing frequency of sectarian or regional violence instigated by climate-driven disruption of access to water or food will result in more large-scale conflicts. I think governments, even in wealthier or recently stable regions, will be destabilized by the stresses climate disruption places on infrastructure for food, water, transportation, immigration and trade.

But I do also think some large-scale changes in behavior wil happen faster than we've ever seen in human history. Solar power will gain efficiency and drop in cost at a rate that mimics the progress in smartphones over the last decade. While it'll still be an expensive and resource-intensive effort to create all these solar cells, they'll be able to beat fossil fuels in every regard — including cost — much sooner than people expect, and with far greater impact than we might predict. I'm not quite as bullish on the path for invention and innovation around removing carbon from the environment, but I wouldn't entirely bet against it, either.

The undermining of the United States' political credibility in the world, and the weakening of its cultural domination over the world, will also yield some benefits in mitigating climate disruption as fewer cultures seek American-style consumption as part of their lifestyles. Not craving giant cars and meat-filled meals will be good for the world, and we're already seeing that shift happen within the United States as well.

All this could add up to enough to have a huge positive impact in just a few decades. That will, sadly, not be enough to save the millions of lives that we'll see lost to climate disruption in the next half-century. But it's possible that millions of people may still be living in Manhattan in 50 years. I'd put the odds at a little less than 50/50.

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Higher Ground

I don't know how this plays out. Not a day goes by that I don't grieve for the horrible tragedies my son is going to have to watch unfold during his lifetime because of our collective shortsightedness and failure to act. The reckoning now is whether what's left after all that chaos still resembles the society we have today (yes, even with all its grave and awful injustices) or if the jolt of these changes is too extreme. It's possible that things become so unpredictable and contentious due to climate change that we never find a new political or cultural stability during his lifetime.

It's hard to believe these things and still have hope, even knowing that our privilege and access and good fortune and talents isolate us from the worst that will come. As a New Yorker who lived here at that time, I still use 9/11 as a reference because it really did change my whole life and my whole perspective. But as the climate evolves, there's a 9/11 every week.

This year, it's wildfires and hurricanes and typhoons and floods and every single one is a record breaker — until next year. I don't know how to say it to make people understand, this isn't about "this year". This is the rest of our lives. I don't even think it makes sense to talk about "preventing" climate disruption now. It's here, and it's already unavoidable for those lowest in society, literally or figuratively. The question is how we move on to preparing for it, for building resiliency into all the institutions and infrastructures that will need to evolve, and how we care for those who are most vulnerable as we keep moving down the path we've chosen.

Honestly, that thought doesn't depress me (though I understand why for so many, it will). It's simply the work in front of us, the task we have to do. I don't feel hopeless because there's no point to feeling hopeless. We simply have to build a world that keeps working while the one that we have today starts to disappear.

Der Tech-Gigant Apple war schon immer, entgegen der frühen Expertenmeinungen, mit seinen Stores erfolgreich. Doch ruht sich Apple auf diesem Erfolg nicht aus, sondern krempelt sein Store-Branding komplett um. Der Mensch und sein Erlebnis mit [...]

Audrey Watters, Hack Education, Oct 16, 2018

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Audrey Watters is, as always, interesting, and in this article as in so many there are some great observations. Such as: "much of the pace of change can be accounted for by the fact that many new technologies are built atop – quite literally – pre-existing systems." But there's also this: "[a] key piece to remember about the history of computing technology and the history of education technology: they are deeply intertwined with the military and with technologies of war." And my thought when I read this was: "well sure, in the U.S. maybe, but what about everywhere else?" Despite noting the use of slates for centuries, Watters relates the story of the 'invention' of the blackboard at West Point, but we can read elsewhere that "James Pillans, Headmaster of the Old High School in Edinburgh, Scotland has been credited with the invention.," using it to teach geography. Not war.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Everyone gets excited talking about who the community is for.

Everyone gets nervous when talking about who the community isn’t for.

Which segments of your customer base, your audience, your employees aren’t a good fit for the community?

Literally, list them down. Be aggressive about it. The more segments you put on the list the better you can delight those off it.

In theory, everyone sees the logic in being specific in who we target and delight in a community.

In practice, ignoring member segments unleashes a bewildering array of internal and external issues. People prefer to avoid the discussion, try to cater to everyone, and create an average community which delights no-one.

Have these discussions early, openly, and honestly. Have a rationale (begin with your most valuable or most enthusiastic audiences) and then create a timeframe or list of requirements to add that segment too (i.e. must have someone to manage this audience).

Now the conversation isn’t about which segments you will or won’t target…but when and why you might target each segment. That might help you…at least a little.

Functional programmers often talk about creating layered designs, where each layer represents a coherent level of abstraction. It’s a way to organize your code.

Transcript

Eric Normand: What do functional programmers mean when we talk about a layered design? Hi, my name is Eric Normand, and these are my thoughts on functional programming.

In the last episode, I was talking about organizing your code. I mentioned something about dependencies, and you should follow the dependencies because those are going to guide you into what goes with what.

As soon as I stopped recording, I realized that there was something I left out. Let’s say, you have some functions, like function A, and it depends on B, and you have a function B that depends on C, and C depends on D.

If you have another function, E, that doesn’t depend on any of those, it’s probably separate and it should be in a separate module, if you’re looking for things to split off into their own modules.

Very often, what you’ll find is when you have these long chain of dependencies, the things at the end of the chain are actually very stable and universally usable in a way that the stuff at the top of the dependency chain is not.

What I mean is, let’s say, you’re writing a program with a lot of graphics. You have stuff that a lot of things depend on that are at the bottom, like how to draw a square or rectangle, how to place text.

Then when you’re actually making your histogram, that’s going to use the placing the text and placing the rectangle. Something that is higher than the histogram is going to do something and draw a histogram on it. That’s going to be on top.

Your A is the thing on top, then B is drawing the histogram, C is your routine for drawing a rectangle. What you should notice is that those things that are at the bottom of that dependency graph, dependency tree, those things start to stabilize. They’re not going to depend on stuff at a higher level of abstraction. They’re going to stay on that low level.

What you’re looking for is like a stratum, like a layer, where all these things are at a very similar level of abstraction. They don’t depend on anything above them, in the level of abstraction, they depend on things lower than them.

That stratum, especially as it starts to stabilize and you’re not modifying it too much, that could totally go in its own namespace or module. A goal is to put code in a file. It’s so stable and so perfect for what you need that you never have to open that file again. You never edit it.

That’s the endpoint past the horizon. That’s what you’re trying to move toward. Something that, I know the five functions in there or maybe it’s 20 functions. I know the 20 functions in there, and I never have to modify them because they’re just solid.

They’re depending on stuff that is modified even more seldom. You’re making this layered design where each layer is a level of abstraction. The things in that layer, at the similar level of abstraction, and the dependencies point down toward things at a lower level of abstraction, lower, and lower.

The things at the higher level, those are the things that are going to change a lot. They change the most. You’re looking for level of abstraction, change, and direction of dependencies.

This is a design that is talked about, I think, at the right length in structure and interpretation of computer programs where you can design these layers so that you do have this property of things depending down on lower level of abstraction. The things at the top are the things that change.

I think they did a graphics thing, too, in structure and interpretation. The picture you’re drawing is the thing that changes the most, because you’re like an artist experimenting with what your picture is going to look like.

Then down at the bottom, you have these really fundamental routines, like plotting pixels and rotating and translating points. That’s all going to be very stable. In between, you have things that are halfway between an artist making some masterpiece and drawing pixels.

It’s some intermediate stuff like mirroring a picture or rotating a picture around an axis, that kind of thing. That’s the layered design. That’s what you’re looking for.

It’s also a handy way to organize your code, to be looking for these modules where the module itself is at a certain level of abstraction and the dependencies are all in one direction.

Awesome. Thank you so much for listening, for watching. My name is Eric Normand, and you can reach me on Twitter. I’m @ericnormand. I also appreciate getting emails. Email me, eric@lispcast.com. See you later.

The post Layered design in functional programming appeared first on LispCast.

Apple hat zwei Metallbänder, die unterschiedlicher nicht sein könnten. Das Milanaise, links im Bild, ist stufenlos verstellbar und sehr anschmiegsam. Das Gliederarmband dagegen ist ein echter Brummer. Wenn man es anlegt, fühlt es sich eher an wie ein massiver Handreif. Man kann es ohne Werkzeug an den eigenen Arm anpassen. Die Glieder lassen sich leicht voneinander trennen und wenn man einen zu dicken Arm hat, dann verkauft Apple zusätzliche Glieder.

Mit dem sehr simplen Wechsel der Bänder wechselt die Uhr nicht nur ihr Aussehen, sondern fühlt sich auch komplett anders an. Sportlern empfehle ich gerne die Alu-Uhr, weil sie so leicht ist. Das Nike-Modell mit den gelochten Sportarmbänder ist absichtlich so kombiniert. Wer gerne einen Wecker am Arm hat, der sollte das Edelstahlmodell kaufen. Mit unterschiedlichen Lederbändern bis zu Hermès kann man dann Luxus hinzufügen. Der ultimative Wecker aber ist die Edelstahluhr mit diesem Gliederarmband. Ich mag dieses Gefühl sehr.

Für die leichteren Momente liebe ich die Sportarmbänder. Und die wechsele ich nach Wetter und Laune. Wer sich da nicht so sicher ist, der nimmt einfach ein weißes oder ein schwarzes. Die gehen immer.

Das kann man leicht mit diesem Shortcut prüfen. Gerne auch mit eigenem Siri-Kommando.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed about known person-ness...

After testing seven more sets of popular packing cubes, we still think the Eagle Creek Pack-It Original Cube Set is the best choice for most travelers for the third year running, thanks to its functional design and excellent build quality. Its simple design features high-quality fabrics and allows you to easily organize and access your clothing and small items.

After spending more than 60 hours researching 30 headsets and testing 10 of them, we’re confident that most people don’t need a wireless office headset. But if you spend the majority of your day taking calls and you’ve been getting by with a set of Bluetooth headphones or cheap wired earbuds, we think the Jabra Evolve 75 is the upgrade you should get.

By now you might have heard: Psychedelics are making a comeback, and not just at Burning Man. Microdosing — “the ingestion of small amounts of LSD to promote mental fitness” — is a growing practice among the Bay Area set. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel — a believer in the technological singularity — now counts a start-up psilocybin laboratory among his investments. Meanwhile, the Cryptopsychedelic Movement brings together advocates of cryptocurrencies and psychedelics, claiming that mutual exposure will increase the value of both.

Following years of advocacy by such organizations as the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and the Heffter Research Institute, a new wave of studies is ending a stagnant period for psychedelic research that began with the substances’ criminalization in the late 1960s. In 2014, the first peer-reviewed study on LSD in more than 40 years was published. A slew of articles in major publications and a high-profile book by science journalist Michael Pollan indicate that the movement is growing, prompting some to proclaim a “psychedelic renaissance.”

Although the “renaissance” is still in its early years, digital technologies have already significantly expanded the horizons of psychedelic research: fMRI scans purport to reveal the real-time action of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, on the brain, and data mining algorithms have found semantic patterns across large volumes of self-reported psychedelic trip stories. (It turns out, for instance, that the phrase “ego death” is more common than “ego loss” and is most frequently connected to “insanity.”) Such research has already had some important consequences: The FDA recently approved psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, and peer-reviewed studies have indicated the efficacy of both psilocybin and LSD in treating end-of-life anxiety associated with terminal cancer. With such promising findings, it seems the best days for psychedelic drugs lie not in the 1960s but the future.

But these scientific, technocratic methods and outcomes seem misaligned with the spiritual rhetoric that accompanied these drugs in the past. If technology is producing a more complete picture of psychedelics, it’s also making them more difficult to view as fonts of mystical experience. Subject to FDA standards and with their effects purportedly rendered in high fidelity by digital imaging systems, LSD, mushrooms, and similar substances now appear decidedly of this world, stripped of their metaphysical patina. In an interview with medical anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz, psilocybin researcher Patrick Kossuth articulated the demystified view: “Let’s assume I’m having a beautiful trip,” he said. “I’m lying there, feeling well, seeing nice colors, interesting shapes, and the music sounds very special to me. I’m also having some unusual ideas. But at any moment of the experience, I know that I’m in this state because I took psilocybin. I rationally ascribe my experiences to the 5-HT2A receptor and not to some higher power. For this reason, I didn’t feel connected to anything supernatural.”

This mundane framing may be necessary to counter the misinformation spread in the late 20th century during the U.S.’s War on Drugs. Making psychedelics seem no more otherworldly than the chemical compounds compressed into tabs of Valium and Prozac would afford legitimacy to both the drugs and the scientists working on them. At a 2014 conference on psychedelic medicine, Jag Davies, director of communications strategy for the Drug Policy Alliance, said that his job was to “make drugs look boring.”

That’s not to say that they are boring. But that view clarifies the cost of hallucinogens’ new legitimacy. Subjective, spiritual experiences are rationalized or dismissed in favor of narrow instrumentalist accounts of the drugs’ efficacy. In Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain (2012), Langlitz documents how neuroscientists working with LSD tend to diverge from early proselytizers in how they envision psychedelics’ effects. In their view, psychedelics can’t open a gateway to a higher consciousness because such a thing doesn’t exist. Some of the researchers Langlitz consulted were not willing to share any thoughts at all on the place of mysticism in psychedelic experiences. Franz Vollenweider, then director of a psilocybin and ketamine research laboratory in Zurich, told Langlitz that “the mystification of drugs in the context of brain research makes such investigations appear dubious.” This is a far cry from how the earlier pioneers of psychedelics saw things. Langlitz recounts the perspectives of Walter Stace, a philosopher who dabbled with hallucinogens in the 1960s: “It’s not a matter of being similar to a mystical experience,” Stace said, “it is a mystical experience.”

Rather than investigating questions of mind, body, and consciousness, the new psychedelic science, in Langlitz’s estimation, instead offers a framework for assessing personal attitudes toward technology — in particular, its growing reach into deep parts of our psyche. In other words, psychedelics are not only legitimized by technology but are best understood themselves as technology. This suggests that the inverse might also be a useful proposition: that technology is psychedelic. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, among others, has suggested that habitual internet use changes our minds at levels beyond our conscious apprehension. The metrics of social media make us rethink the importance of life events we post about; feedback from self-tracking devices changes our attitude toward physical habits. Digitization and measurement translate the nuanced phenomena of our lives into instructions: walking becomes a quest to take more steps; photography, a game of editing and strategic hashtagging for more likes.

This transformation of daily existence into a series of incentives may provide a sense of order and clarity. But we ultimately risk losing a sense of the intrinsic worth of experience. This is essentially the same dilemma with psychedelic research. Rationalizing and instrumentalizing the drugs may make them more situationally useful, but it may also preclude their more exploratory, experiential uses.

To find clear meaning in psychedelic science, Langlitz suggests we need not only digital research tools but also methods that favor open-endedness over a neat path to scientific conclusions. But the current wave of psychedelic science demonstrates what critic Evgeny Morozov has called “technological solutionism”: “an endemic ideology that recasts complex social phenomena like politics, public health, education, and law enforcement as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized — if only the right algorithms are in place.” The new psychedelic research threatens to retrofit the drugs to a solutionist approach, which may account for Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm. Despite their history as holy medicine and channels for divine contact, psychedelic compounds are seen by current researchers as therapeutic solutions to complicated afflictions like depression and addiction. When the compounds’ spiritual and cultural history is acknowledged, it remains restricted by the materialist entrapments of scientific orthodoxy — the mystical encounters of psychedelia can be proclaimed only as temporary neurochemical phantasms.

Some have challenged this logic — at a recent event held by Chacruna, a psychedelic advocacy network, scholars and advocates explored the impact of profit motives on psychedelic studies — but such instances are exceptions, not the rule. Psychedelic enthusiasts of the old school are generally not in a position to critique the tech industry’s enthusiasm. The resources available to study these substances remain limited, and their checkered reputation remains too a significant barrier for psychedelic advocates to criticize any source of funding and legitimacy.

Nonetheless, the tension between instrumentalized and exploratory approaches to psychedelics should not simply be dismissed. If the long-term impact of psychedelic research is shaped by the psychopharmaceutical industry, it would threaten the social potential of a psychedelic revival. The intertwining of mind-altering drugs and politics in the 1960s sparked a movement that embraced communitarianism over individualism and promised an immanent new consciousness. Of course, such optimism proved premature, but the promise of a psychedelic politics didn’t end with the new millennium.

Before his death, cultural critical Mark Fisher was working on a book titled Acid Communism, a vision for a post-capitalist world that drew from the reality-altering effects of hallucinogens, along with the culture they inspired. In some ways the work was a more optimistic follow up to his Capitalist Realism, which addressed the famous question — attributed to several different Marxist thinkers — of why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fisher argued that capitalism disguises itself as a social inevitability, foreclosing the possibility for another political order to emerge and making anyone who would propose alternatives seem out of touch with reality.

But Fisher thought that a noncapitalist future could manifest, if only we knew where to look for inspiration. Acid Communism was to explore the possibility that psychedelia might open radically new political landscapes. Plan C, a political collective with which Fisher was associated, describes how he believed that “the consciousness changing effects of psychedelia, which worked through pop culture to embed a notion that reality is plastic and changeable,” and so could be used to raise class consciousness. He argued that the tendency of psychedelics to destabilize concrete notions of self and society could be leveraged for political benefit. Thus the psychedelic experience should not be charged with escapism — as it often had been by critics from the 1960s onward — but investigated for its ability to reshape the world.

This sentiment had also been voiced by the most famous figures from psychedelic history. Timothy Leary’s well-known mantra “tune in, turn on, drop out” has often been censured as a command to disengage from society, but in his autobiography Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era, he argues this is a misreading. “‘Drop out’ suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments,” he noted. “‘Drop out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean ‘get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.’ ”

Still, it’s easy to interpret the directives of Timothy Leary and his contemporaries as aligned with the Silicon Valley model: tune in (to yourself), turn on (to the solution — in this case, drugs; in others, a digital screen), drop out (of seeing your problem as not your own, but society’s). Many 1960s thinkers of Leary’s ilk scarcely remarked on the fact that rejecting involuntary commitments is a luxury that not everyone can afford. This is perhaps even more true now than during the economic boom of the 1960s.

For Fisher, this was not an abstract matter. On his blog, k-punk, he wrote frequently about his lifelong struggle with depression, which he argued stemmed from capitalism’s competitive, inherently antisocial nature. Capitalism, he claimed, preempts any thoughts, feelings, and ways of being that it cannot exploit for market value, which in turn leads to an almost unbearable sense of estrangement. If we accept Fisher’s view of depression as produced by the current political order — a regime supported by the tech industry — then political overhaul is the ultimate cure. In his vision, the pro-social, self-transcending and irreverent qualities of psychedelia are a threat to the psychopolitical mechanisms by which capitalism maintains its authority. Depression, however, tends to be understood in terms that suit pharmaceutical companies, as neurochemical and individualistic rather than a structural social condition. Technological solutionism fortifies capitalism by reinforcing this view, holding individuals responsible for complex situations that could only be resolved through social action. Why consider politics when we can manage these issues with a pill?

The innovations and interest of the tech industry may be required to give psychedelic research momentum, even if it may work against its broader political potential. Notably, the people who need psychedelic therapy the most may need it with the tech sector’s signature quick rollout times: The success of MDMA in treating post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans — a group at high risk for suicide — has already been confirmed. Current studies are exploring psilocybin’s potential for treatment-resistant depression and anxiety associated with cancer. These populations wouldn’t benefit from the long-term effort required to dismantle capitalism, and they shouldn’t have to wait for that to reap some of the benefits of psychedelic research.

But it’s ultimately not a matter of seeing left idealism and techno-scientific pragmatism as cancelling each other out. In the most optimistic view, psychedelic science will have us innovating ourselves out of the psycho-political chokehold that strangles our social imagination. Legal LSD taken for anxiety or to boost our brains at work will probably not end up turning everyone on to socialism and thus dissolving the industrial forces that backed its development. But the fact that psychedelia is blessed by the technology and pharmaceutical sectors does not prevent it from potentially expanding our political imagination. The special qualities of psychedelic therapy may make it impossible to suppress its political implications.

For this to happen, scientific research on psychedelics must continue — which will at times require dialogue between the profit-oriented companies and those who see psychedelics as a challenge to the normative order of industry. The political potential inherent to the psychedelic experience is too important to ignore. Psychedelic research demands the input of those who have reflected deeply on what the special nature of its experience can do not only for individuals, but society. It will require openness to values that are at odds with technological solutionism if the long-term outcome of the psychedelic revival is ever to truly serve us all.

Apple’s latest flagship smartphone, the iPhone XS Max, has earned an overall DxOMark of 105, making it the photography lab’s second highest rated mobile camera to date.

DxO awarded the iPhone XS Max’s camera and video capabilities scores of 110 and 96, respectively.

Currently, the only camera that’s more capable according to DxO is the Huawei P20 Pro, which holds an overall score of 109. That said, it’s important to keep in mind that there are certain areas where the iPhone XS Max excels over the P20 Pro.

Similarly, there are also areas in which lower overall rated cameras such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 beat out the iPhone.

For instance, speaking to the iPhone XS Max’s depth of field simulation, DxO writes: “The iPhone XS Max comes with one of the best bokeh simulation modes in the business.”

DxO goes on to add, “The new iPhone’s bokeh images also show better detail in the face and hair of portrait subjects than some direct rivals, such as the Huawei P20 Pro.”

The website also gave notable praise to Apple’s new Smart HDR algorithm, noting that it “does a great job” and that images shot with the iPhone XS Max show “very good target exposure and wide dynamic range in bright light and indoor conditions alike.”

Some of the high-contrast shots DxO shared, particularly those that involved challenging backlit scenes, are especially impressive.

One notable area of weakness for the iPhone’s camera was noise in low-light situations. In scenes where there was little light, the iPhone XS Max produced “considerably more grain than its rivals,” according to DxO’s testing.

Similarly, zoom was another area where the devices like the P20 Pro and Galaxy Note 9 fared better than the iPhone. DxOMark says it noticed a loss of detail and harsh noise in some of the shots it took with the XS Max’s telephoto lens.

Visit DxOMark’s website to read its full review of the iPhone XS Max’s camera.

Additionally, for a more detailed explanation on how DxOMark scores work, check out the article I wrote on the Galaxy S9 then top camera score.

Source: DxOMark

The post DxOMark declares iPhone XS Max ‘One of the best mobile cameras’ appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Toronto-based national carrier Rogers has released a new set of ‘Canada+US’ Share Everything plans.

Each plan allows users to access their full data allotments in both Canada and the U.S., as well as send and receive unlimited long distance phone calls and text messages to both Canadian and American phone numbers.

“You can stay connected, worry-free, across Canada and the U.S.,” reads an excerpt from the Rogers website.

“Talk, text and use your plan’s data just like you do at home.”

The plans come in the same data allotment denominations as Rogers’s Canadian Share Everything plans  — 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 6GB and 8GB — but cost $15 more than their equivalent unlimited Canada-wide calling Share Everything plans.

For example, Rogers currently has a promotion for its 1GB Share Everything plan that comes with an additional 2GB of bonus data. The unlimited Canada-wide calling version of this plan costs $85, but the Canada+US plan costs $100.

The new Canada+US plans are an alternative to Rogers’ ‘Roam Like Home’ feature, which allows subscribers to pay $7 per day in the U.S. to access the carrier’s full suite of wireless services while travelling abroad.

Roam Like Home charges accumulate for a maximum of 15 days — a total of $105 CAD.

The new Canada+US plans are available for both consumer and small business subscribers.

Source: Rogers

The post Rogers launches new ‘Canada+US’ wireless rate plans appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Cupertino computing giant Apple and Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon issued statements to Bloomberg denying allegations that Chinese spies planted microchips at factories commissioned by an American company to manufacture server motherboards.

The October 4th, 2018 Bloomberg report, citing anonymous government and corporate sources, claimed that Chinese spies were able to use microchips planted at Chinese factories that manufacture server motherboards for San Jose-based Super Micro Computer Inc. (Supermicro) to spy on approximately 30 U.S. companies, including one major bank, government contractors, as well as both Apple and Amazon.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, Amazon discovered tiny microchips on Supermicro-manufactured server motherboards used by video compression startup Elemental Technologies when Amazon tapped Elemental to assist in launching a video streaming service that would eventually become Amazon Prime Video.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon alerted U.S. authorities sometime in 2015, which then began their own investigation.

The investigation is still open, three years after Amazon alerted the U.S. government.

U.S. investigators reportedly discovered that the microchips were embedded onto server motherboards by unit operatives of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army during the hardware manufacturing process.

Amazon’s statement to Bloomberg denied knowledge of any “malicious chips.”

“It’s untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise, an issue with malicious chips, or hardware modifications when acquiring Elemental,” wrote Amazon, in a statement to Bloomberg.

Apple reportedly discovered microchips embedded onto Supermicro motherboards in summer 2015, and ended a relationship with the company a year later.

Apple’s statement also denied knowledge of any malicious chips.

“On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, ‘hardware manipulations’ or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server,” said Apple, in a statement issued to Bloomberg.

Apple has since posted a formal statement on its website, once again denying the claims raised in Bloomberg‘s report.

“Despite numerous discussions across multiple teams and organizations, no one at Apple has ever heard of this investigation,” wrote Apple, in its October 4th, 2018 media release.

“No one from Apple ever reached out to the FBI about anything like this, and we have never heard from the FBI about an investigation of this kind — much less tried to restrict it.”

According to Bloomberg’s report, the FBI and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which represents both the CIA and the NSA — declined to comment.

Complete Bloomberg-acquired statements from Amazon, Apple, Supermicro and the Chinese government can be read here.

Update 04/10/2018 4:31pm ET: Story updated with Apple’s October 4th, 2018 media release.

Source: Bloomberg

The post Apple, Amazon deny Bloomberg report alleging Chinese microchip spying appeared first on MobileSyrup.

An awful lot of music courses these days have group-based practical projects as at least one module within the course. This is, I think, a positive trend, in that it encourages you situate your learning within the context of your own practice as creative professionals, but it definitely requires some thought regarding how to organise yourselves in a group. So here are a few thoughts on how to do that:

• Firstly, you need to decide on a shared communication method – it could be email, a Facebook group chat (or group), Whatsapp group, Skype chat, Google Hangout… You’ll need both ongoing text chat and probably the option to have audio or video meetings, depending on how often you’re able to meet face to face. So, decide on this straight away, and make sure it’s one that everyone can access.

• Secondly, you’ll need some kind of shared calendar into which you can put tasks and deadlines and assign roles. Google Calendar is as good as any for this, and is pretty widely supported on the web and via phone apps. It may be that your college or university has the option to create shared events via their web services, which is fine too. There are also a LOAD of great task-sharing apps – Wunderlist, Trello, etc… Some are paid, some are free. Do some research (assign someone the task) and settle on what you’re going to use within the first 24 hours of forming the group. Make a rule that you all check the calendar for that days tasks every day.

• Along side this, you’ll need a space where you can all share documents, resources etc. Google Docs/Drive is good for this, and I think Microsoft Office 365 also has this option. Dropbox is great if everyone has an account. Google Docs makes it possible to collaborate on the same document in real time. That can be really handy if one of you is, for example, writing a press release, and someone else is proof reading it.

• Establish a set of guidelines straight away that everyone agrees to regarding what you do when someone misses a deadline. Get it down in a document before you start so that you can deal with people who are unreliable without it having to get personal. If someone is missing deadlines as assigned in the calendar, have a protocol for reassigning that work, and for finding out what on earth is going on.

• Set regular times to check in and report back on what you’ve done. If it’s a big project, you can do this at the end of every day – start the day with the to-do list, end it logging the tasks that have been accomplished. If you’ve got a little more time to work on it, you might decide you only need to do this every other day, or three times a week… But make sure it’s regular so you can keep a track of jobs that are missed. If it’s part of a 10 week module, you REALLY can’t afford to be waiting a week to find out that a whole load of the work that you’re all relying on has been missed.
  Keep your tutor in the loop. Make sure that each week you report back on what’s going on, where you’re up to and what you need help with. If they’re available for tutorials, book time with them. If they aren’t, but they are available via email, check that it’s OK, then contact them.

• Find out where the other staff are in your institution that may be able to help you. Get all the support you can, and then apply your initiative and learning to get on with it.

• Document EVERYTHING. Keep accurate notes of what you’re up to, and what you need to do, make sure that meetings are minuted (one person keeping a log of everything that is discussed and decided), use the camera on your phone to take pictures and video of all the stuff you get up to – sharing the story of your project can help make it interesting for your potential audience, so use the story of the project to support the project!

• Sort out your own plan for time management – if you are prone to wasting endless hours online, or gaming, or watching TV or whatever, commit to finishing the tasks on your list daily before you reward yourself with your leisure pursuit of choice. Don’t let the group down because you’re too undisciplined to put the PS4 away for a few hours…

Project work can be an amazing chance to try things out, learn from your peers, and get valuable experience in your chosen field, as well as to develop skills you didn’t even know you might need. Enter into the task with enthusiasm and an open mind, get the work done, and enjoy it – it could end up helping you decide what you really want to do with your life!

LG is actively developing a foldable display smartphone, the company’s mobile head, Jeong-hwan Hwang, confirmed at a press conference in South Korea dedicated to the launch of the V40 ThinQ.

According to South Korea’s Yonhap News, which was at the press conference, Hwang went on to state that LG doesn’t aim to be among the first smartphone manufacturers to release a foldable smartphone. Instead, the company’s aim is to release a device when it will have clear consumer value.

Earlier this week, a hands-on video showcasing a prototype Lenovo foldable smartphone surfaced online. If the foldable smartphones Samsung, Huawei et al are developing is anything like the Lenovo device from earlier this week, then it’s likely a smart move on LG’s part not to rush to market with a foldable smartphone.

Hwang also said that LG plans to release a 5G-capable smartphone in 2019.

Source: Yonhap News Via: Android Authority

The post LG Mobile CEO confirms company is developing foldable smartphone appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Earlier today, Bloomberg published a story claiming that Apple and Amazon discovered tiny, malicious chips on Elemental network servers built by Super Micro. According to the story, the chips were the work of Chinese spies and designed to infiltrate the tech companies’ networks. Shortly after publication, Apple responded in an email statement strongly refuting Bloomberg’s account.

Amazon’s chief information security officer similarly discredited the claims saying in part:

There are so many inaccuracies in this article as it relates to Amazon that they’re hard to count.

A short time ago, Apple elaborated on its initial statement to Bloomberg on its Newsroom website:

In response to Bloomberg’s latest version of the narrative, we present the following facts: Siri and Topsy never shared servers; Siri has never been deployed on servers sold to us by Super Micro; and Topsy data was limited to approximately 2,000 Super Micro servers, not 7,000. None of those servers have ever been found to hold malicious chips.

Topsy is a startup that Apple acquired in 2013.

For over 12 months, Apple says it repeatedly told Bloomberg reporters and editors that they and their sources were incorrect.

We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple.

Security and privacy are cornerstones of Apple’s business that it uses to differentiate the company’s products from competitors’, so the fact that the company takes this sort of claim seriously isn’t unusual. This also isn’t the first time Apple has taken Bloomberg to task on the veracity of its reporting. However, the forcefulness of the responses from Apple and Amazon, followed by Apple’s press release on its Newsroom site is something that is unprecedented. It will be interesting to see whether Bloomberg responds.

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For my convenience and yours, here are all of Strange Loop 2018 posts:

• Day One
• Simon Peyton Jones on Teaching CS in the Schools
• David Schmüdde and the Art of Misuse
• The Quotable Wadler
• Day Two

... and few parting thoughts of the non-technical variety:

• All the images used in these posts are photos I took at the conference. They are licensed CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.


• On Day One, Jason Dagit kept saying H.E., for "homomorphic encryption". For a while I was confused, because my brain kept hearing A.G.


• I left my laptop in the hotel room this year, in order to engage more with the talks and the people than with a web browser. I'm glad I did: I enjoyed the talks more. I also took fewer and more focused notes. That made blogging easier and quicker.


• I also decided not to acquire swag as greedily as usual, and I did a pretty good job of holding back... except for this beautiful hard-bound Jane Street notebook with graphed pages: "Enter the Monad." Very nice. They must be doing well.


• I left St. Louis with a lot of plastic. The Stifel Theater, the conference's main venue, does not recycle plastic. Like many conference goers, I went through a fair number of water and soda bottles. I hate to see all that plastic go into the landfill and, having driven down, I did not have to contribute. Twice a day, I took whatever bottles I had emptied, and whatever other bottles I found lying around, back to my car and through them in the trunk. When I got home, they went straight into the recycling bin. Yet another advantage to driving over flying.

I think that's all from Strange Loop 2018. It was fun.

Stephen answered Myke's PopSocket challenge, and Federico attempts to name all of iOS 12.1's new emoji.

On this week’s episode of Connected, the most accurate description of iOS 12.1’s new emoji you’ll ever find. You can (and should) listen here.

Sponsored by:

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→ Source: relay.fm

Google and PRX are partnering to give potential podcast makers a way into the growing industry — especially if they represent an underrepresented voice in podcasting.

PRX, or the Public Radio Exchange, will manage the Mountain View-based search giant’s podcast accelerator.

Starting October 4th, podcast hopefuls can apply to the Google Podcast creators program. The program wants creative, engaged producers that represent a range of geographies, backgrounds views, voices and styles.

Furthermore, applicants should self-identify as marginalized, or their intended audience should self-identify as marginalized.

Finally, the podcast idea should be fresh and compelling, and creators should be interested in making podcasts sustainable regarding revenue and audience growth.

The Google Podcasts creator program seeks to provide greater access for the underrepresented voices in podcasting. According to the search giant’s blog post, that includes women and people of colour. Additionally, it hopes to educate a global community with free tools, and showcase participants work as a model for others.

PRX and a global advisory committee will select teams to receive mentorship, seed funding and 20 weeks of training

Applications will close on November 18th, 2018.

Even if you don’t make the cut for the program — or if you want to learn more about podcasting but aren’t ready to apply — you can still benefit. PRX will develop a series of podcasting 101 videos based on learnings from the program.

To apply, or to learn more about the program, check out the Google Podcasts creator program website.

Source: Google

The post Applications for Google’s podcast accelerator are open now appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Roland Tanglao 猪肉面 @rtanglao
Blogging for over 17 years, you should try it! :-) rolandtanglao.com/2018/10/03/p1-…

I showed you my desk. Let me show you my desktops. And there is a method.

Having worked with software for more than 40 years I have learned that customizing adds complexity. And complexity kills you in the end. I don't tinker with my tools. I run macOS like Apple intended it to, and the same goes for Windows. You probably remember the phase I had with Windows as a Hobby? It wasn't a tool then. It wasn't running computers I worked on. Maybe it was a virtual machine, or a computer I would randomly turn on. But it wasn't my workbench.

I keep my computers clean. If somebody sends a computer and it's not factory reset, I reset it. I will not accept any system that is not in the original state. Then I go through the standard setup process, let it sit there for hours until it has updated its software, and then I remove every piece of crapware that came with it. No games, no freebies, no nothing. Then I add the software I really use. Not the things I may use one day, but only the software I will use in the next 24 hours.

I never follow any of those "ten things you need to change on your new computer" articles. Chances are that the author, who wrote this, knows less than I do. And he will certainly know a lot less than those who built it. I set the system language to English, my locale to German. And then I make as few adjustments as I possibly can. I don't even bother with the wallpaper. The one thing I change on Windows 10 is that I disable Cortana. For the same reason I previously killed Clippy.

There is nothing on the desktop at the end of the day. Everything is cloud backed up. If that computers dies a sudden violent death, I will not lose any data. I would just have to setup a new machine.

Keep your attack surface small. Don't install anything you don't need. Dispose off things you no longer need. Reduce to the max.

A friend from Moscow, who was coming to our house to celebrate my birthday with me was refused a visa. Because, between the other things, they couldn’t see clearly why she was coming. Which made me thinking of what can actually can serve as an evidence of a friendship.

She is a singer. And as long as I know her I enjoy both, listening to her own songs and singing together, across times and locations. Do I have an evidence of planning my trips to Moscow so I could come to one of her concerts? I do have photos from those few that I was able to attend and posters of many more that I missed.

I wasn’t up for celebrating anything after my mother passed away two year ago. But once an idea of her singing in our house for my birthday came up I was up for a party. The one coming Sunday. It is still on, but will be different without her physical presence here. Still, I am very grateful that she gave me the impulse of doing it, as a sign that life gets back to normal.

Our FB “friendship” goes back three years. Does it say much about 33 years that we know each other? Can it show ups and downs, eating pasta with mayonnaise after school, sharing stories of falling in love and various songs sang together that come up thinking of when we were 15 or 22 or 30somethings?

Do I have photos of us together? Hardly. We don’t think of making selfies when I come staying in her house adding my three kids to her five. We cook and talk, feed the kids and make sure that they can play outside while we have some uninterrupted time for tea. We pack swimming gear, water and food to go to the lake nearby. Or we look for the right sizes of boots, gloves or skiing shoes, so my kids can enjoy building castles in the deep snow or try cross-country skiing in the fields behind the house. Or we escape to the sauna, to share stories of falling and standing up again, interrupted by her husband knocking on the door because her baby or mine is hungry and can’t wait any longer.

Do I have much evidence of her being next to me at the hard times? Two of us sitting in the kitchen (the one of pasta with mayonnaise) after the funeral of my mother? Her offer to host three of my kids when I was up to the last stretch of emptying the house I grew up? Coming to pick them up again instead of having a sauna time together when I couldn’t finish that in time?

I might have a bit of photos of the good times. Those where she sings at our wedding. Photos of camping at Valday (but how do you capture the fun of singing by the fire or jumping in the cold lake after the heat in the sauna tent?) I do have photos of our kids together in various ages and combinations. Of the capes that she made for her kids because mine had them. Of our kids making and eating sushi in her kitchen. Of them playing in their garden, in the deep snow or in the warmth of the sun.

But still, how much photos can say about the friendship behind? About the meaning of having a party to celebrate coming back to life after the hard times? About the fun of finally being able to share my house and my garden with her, after spending so much time in her house and seeing it morph from before kids “walls with window holes” structure into a family home?

Anyway. She changed the tickets to mid-January and we are up for a visa quest again. May be we should be smart and write an exciting tourist program for her in the Netherlands. That’s probably easier to justify than spending a week in my house with signing at my birthday, baking bread, working in the garden and sharing the life that I live here.

 

The post Evidence of a friendship appeared first on Mathemagenic.

The friendly people at Argon40, one of our Approved Resellers in Hong Kong, have an already-successful Kickstarter on the go for their Argon ONE Raspberry Pi case. I’ve got one of them on my desk at the moment. It’s a very pleasing object. “That’s quite nice,” enthuses Gordon, who isn’t very good at enthusing.

The Argon ONE: look at the shiny!

The Argon ONE is a nifty little aluminium-alloy case that offers well thought-through cable, power, and temperature management. We chatted to Joseph from Argon40 about the team’s development process, and he explained:

When we started the project, we initially designed the product to suit our needs based on our experiences of playing around with the Raspberry Pi. We wanted a case that is nice to look and at the same time has all the basic features that we loved about the Raspberry Pi: small footprint, access to GPIO, low power consumption. Then we looked into the nice-to-have stuff like good heat dissipation for better performance, a proper shut-down, and a form factor that is elegant but not extravagant.

Clicky magnets

What I find particularly satisfying about the Argon ONE is its GPIO access. It has a neat recess with clear pin labels and access to an inbuilt, colour-coded header that connects to your Pi’s GPIO pins. When you’re not using the pins, you probably want to keep them away from dust, spilled coffee, and the gross candy-corn M&Ms that Alex sometimes throws at you for literally no reason. The Argon ONE helps you out here: a cover fits perfectly over the GPIO recess, held in place by magnets that are just exactly strong enough for the job. Being a fidgeter, I find that this lends itself to compulsive clicking.

Injection moulding

We like the build quality here, especially at this price point (it’s HK$157, US$20, or GB£15, and early-bird pledges are cheaper). The Argon40 team was keen to use alumnium for the upper part of the case, for robustness and durability along with good looks; that proved a challenge, given that they wanted to keep the case affordable. “Fortunately, we found a factory that allowed us to do aluminum-alloy injection instead of going for the CNC option,” says Joseph.

“Have you tried turning if off and on again?”

The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a power button, and we hear a lot from people who’d like it to. Happily, our community has come up with lots of ways to add one: this case, for example. Once you install Argon40’s shutdown script in Raspbian, pressing the case’s power button will run the script to shut the Pi down cleanly, then cut the power.

Find out more on Kickstarter — this campaign is well worth a look if you’re after a decent case. Back to Joseph for the last word, with which we heartily agree:

At the end of the day, our goal is for people to have their Raspberry Pis on top of their work desks, study tables, and workstations and in their living rooms, instead of keeping their barebones Pi tucked inside a drawer. Because as the saying goes, “Out of sight, out of mind,” which means that if they don’t see their Raspberry Pi, they won’t be able to tinker around with it or play with it to create projects.

The post Argon ONE: a super case for your Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

mkalus shared this story from Motherboard.

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A broken hip, a love story and a 19-day mission to get my parents home.

My wife, Sachi, dropped me off at the baggage claim terminal so I could meet my parents arriving at the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Their trip and subsequent arrival had been a source of stress amongst the family, as my Mom is 79 and my Dad is 83 and both have health concerns. My brothers in North Carolina, where my parents originated, thought they shouldn’t be traveling. Maybe they were right.

I made plans to greet them near baggage claim, right outside of security. As people wove their way toward the carousel I saw them moving slowly towards me. People flowed around them as they walked at half speed. Dad noticed me from afar and motioned to Mom with the brush of an elbow. Their four-day trip was about to begin.

We gathered their bags and headed out to the curb where Sachi was to pick us up. As we exited the doors, Mom and I discussed how her legs were feeling and she said they were good, despite it having been a long day. I asked because my brothers and I had been bugging her about walking more.

We passed a metal grate on the walkway by the curbside pickup area that was a minor obstacle for her. I noticed another one about 15 yards ahead. I made a quick mental note. There was a long line of people on the sidewalk by the curb and I wondered why they were there. Taxi line? Bus pickup? As we passed them, we had to form a single file line to get through a bottleneck caused by a trash can. I went first, then Mom, then Dad.

For a brief moment, I was on alert for our car as Sachi had texted that she was close. I was hoping to guide us to the car and out of the airport mess. Then I heard a crash behind me and out of the corner of my eye, I saw my Mom fall to the concrete. Travelers around us gasped audibly.

The next thing I remember is my Mom on her backside beside the trash can, with six people gathered around her, a few feet from her face, offering to help. She was confused and overwhelmed and I told them forcefully, “I am her son. I will take care of this.” I felt overwhelmed and needed to try to create some calm in the chaos but wasn’t sure how.

Mom was injured, Dad was confused, Sachi was somewhere in the maze of cars and multiple people were trying to help. Someone alerted me that they had called 911 and I felt relieved and a little embarrassed that I was not the one calling. Also, did we really need paramedics? Was it that bad? I quickly texted Sachi two messages:

“Mom fell”

“Paramedics”

A couple of people who witnessed the fall remained with us. One woman, in particular, seemed shaken. She handed me a phone at one point with a 911 operator. The operator said paramedics were on the way and verified some information. I got the feeling the woman didn’t make the original call but called 911 just in case. She was eager to help, but her efforts felt intrusive at the time. It felt like another person I needed to manage. In the heat of the moment, I had to tell her, “Thank you, but I have it covered.”

It was not clear to me what had happened in the fall, but it seemed she had tripped on the metal grate, grabbed for the trash can, spun 90 degrees and fell directly on her left hip. I held out hope it was just a bad bruise. She’ll be sore I thought, but she’ll still have a good trip. She’ll sleep at my house tonight. These were the thoughts I needed to think at the time.

My Mom, who had some open wounds on her hand and wrist pointed to her hip. “It hurts right there.” Any attempt to move her or her leg would summon sounds of severe pain. Even touching her left foot would cause her to writhe. As I called Sachi to explain the situation, my Dad, who has dementia, tried to help her stand up and I had to quickly stop him from moving her. He wanted so badly to help, but couldn’t grasp the potential severity of the situation.

Once we got her resting on the wall by the sidewalk and had paramedics on the way, I had to time evaluate what had just happened. The chaos was quickly replaced by feelings of guilt that would become a part of this entire experience. How could I have let this happen? Why didn’t I do something more to prevent it? I checked in with Mom and reassured Dad, who was concerned and confused. Just as the paramedics got her into the ambulance, I noticed the helpful woman, on a bench a few yards away, with tears in her eyes.

Within 30 minutes we arrived at a nearby hospital and waited with her in the ER. My brother, who had dropped my parents off at the airport in Charlotte, texted me, “Are they there yet?”

That was not a text I wanted to see. I didn’t respond immediately and told Mom that David was asking about her and I that I really didn’t want to tell him what had happened. She said, “You’re just delaying the inevitable.” She was right, but I waited nevertheless.

The ER doctor asked to talk to me outside of the room and said, “I’m concerned your Mom has a broken hip and will need a hip replacement. I’m ordering X-rays, but I want you to know the situation.”

I asked, not knowing anything about hip fractures, “Do you mean a hip replacement now, or sometime in the future?”

She said, “As soon as possible.”

I called my brother to share what news I had; a text wouldn’t do. He and his wife, Shannon, were concerned about Mom, but also Sachi and me. They assured me it wasn’t my fault and offered to do anything they could. Their empathy for me at that moment soothed one of the most anxious times of my life.

Over the course of that first night, it was difficult not to think through worst case scenarios. My first thought was she and Dad could be in Seattle for months instead of a long weekend. Mom is on chemotherapy for a form of blood and bone cancer called Multiple Myeloma. There could be complications. She could get pneumonia. There could be an infection. My mind raced.

While Sachi and I could care for them, I was more concerned about them being away from our extended family (and dog) in North Carolina for so long. I am the only family member on the west coast. Could they end up being marooned in this far off place?

Later that night, it was confirmed. Her hip was fractured. The “ball” part of the hip joint at the top of her femur had broken off. She would need a partial hip replacement. That night she was admitted to the hospital on heavy medication and we drove home with Dad, who started to ask questions that would become a part of every day. “Why isn’t Mom with us?”, “What happened to Mom?” We answered politely and just tried to get home after a long and difficult day.

The next day the reality of living with my father became clearer. He is a kind-hearted soul who is attached to my Mom with incredible force. They have been married since 1956 and have been at each other’s side ever since. He loves her deeply and she has been his primary caretaker as his memory has waned. For him, waking up in a strange bedroom without her was a disheartening and confusing experience, I’m sure.

The stress of the entire event weighed on all of us, but over the first few days, I felt more exhausted than I had in a long time. Soon, I came to realize it was a kind of emotional exhaustion. Mom had surgery and was healing without complications. She’s tough as nails and never wants anyone to worry about her. Dad was another story. The reality of Mom’s fall, her surgery and hospitalization could not get seated in his mind. It just wouldn’t stick.

He asked about her constantly and we had to watch him realize the gravity of the situation each time. “Dad, she fell at the airport and broke her hip. She’s in the hospital and healing right now.”

His face would grow concerned and he would say, “A broken hip? That sounds really bad, doesn’t it?” He put his hands over his face.

I could only answer, “Yes, Dad. But, she’s doing great.” These conversations carried weight beyond their words. On repeat, they drained us both.

Soon after the fall, I started researching hip replacements and recovery timelines. What I found amazed me. The day after surgery, the goal is to have the patient stand up and move to a toilet. The next day, they can walk a few steps. Within a few weeks, they can usually walk on their own, but should have a walker for safety. Within 3–4 months, many return to normal. Amazing.

Unlike a broken bone that must heal bone-to-bone, a hip replacement is much stronger and more secure. It’s apparently not as fragile because a piece of metal with a new ball joint is cemented into the femur, replacing the broken one that fit into the hip socket. The goal, more than anything, is mobility via physical therapy.

After surgery, Mom was only given Tylenol for pain, which seemed to return her to normal. The opiates she was taking before the surgery caused her to start sentences and never finish them, or just make really strange non-sequitur statements. This, of course, distressed my Dad. He didn’t know why and looked at me with a shake of the head that said, “This isn’t right, and I’m worried.” I told him it was just the drugs, it didn’t stick. More than anything he hated leaving her at the hospital. He would enter the elevator and lower his head in the corner to recover.

Thankfully, my Dad was agreeable and a good sport, all things considered. But his dementia represented a constant learning experience. After having him walk into our bedroom in the middle of the night, we put little signs on the doors that led him to his room and the bathroom. We took the lead in reminding him about his daily care, from medications to showers to brushing his teeth and changing his clothes for each day. He no longer has the ability to remember to do those things himself. The real challenge, though, was getting calories into him. Every day Sachi and I would look for new dishes to try and each time he would say “I just don’t have an appetite. I could eat if Mom was here.”

In the years leading up to this trip, I had visited my parents in North Carolina at least twice a year but never had the chance to be alone with my Dad for extended periods. This showed me his reality in a way I didn’t expect. Each day, we drove to the hospital and each day, he made the same observations at the same locations on the trip. He’d ask about the city across the Lake Washington, “It’s Bellevue.” And notice the size of the evergreens by the road, “Yes, they are huge.”

I soon realized we shared very little context. Normally, I might tell a visitor something interesting about Seattle, like how it’s situated between multiple mountain ranges and then prove my point over their visit. This wasn’t possible in our conversations. Points of reference disappeared into the ether soon after they were spoken. We no longer had inside jokes or ways to build onto conversations past. Everything in his world was experienced almost exclusively in real time.

There were some exceptions. My Dad can remember stories from his childhood and scenes from his young adult life. If you can get him rolling on a scene, he can be entertaining and seem normal. At dinner one night, we had animated discussions about the two years he dated Mom, when they were teenagers. He told me he drove a ‘49 Ford, and of course, I had to show him a photo of one on my phone. His was like that, but green.

Over many days, some references would start to sink in. As we drove along the lake, he would say, “That’s Bellevue, isn’t it?”

I would smile, “Yep, that’s right!” while trying not to sound patronizing. Despite his lack of memory, I always try to remember that he is still a functioning person who feels embarrassment and even shame. While he doesn’t know when he asks the same question repeatedly, he knows when someone is exasperated or frustrated and I try my best to always answer his questions as if they were asked the first time.

The hardest and unfortunately, the most common questions to answer were about Mom and why she wasn’t with us. I told her that Dad didn’t seem to be able to grasp the situation and she suggested giving him notes on a piece of paper he can carry with him. That night I typed a note and left it on his bed. The next morning it was folded up in his shirt pocket for easy reference. This turned out to be one of the best methods for keeping him updated and soothing his worry. He read it multiple times a day. I eventually had to tape it together to keep it intact.

Life at home continued to be an exercise in problem-solving. With Dad eating so little, we asked Mom for his favorite dishes and tried to recreate them. We found a winner in hamburger steak and gravy. Each day we bought a newspaper and tuned the TV to NatGeo in an effort to make our house feel like his. With Sachi managing our household and business and me being a caretaker, we got into a groove after a few days.

Within a week of the fall, Mom was feeling good and her physical therapists were impressed. We visited her twice a day at a skilled nursing facility and soon started to leave Dad with her for hours in the afternoon or evening. This gave us a chance to get some work done and even go to a soccer match.

Each time we returned to take him home, he didn’t want to leave. He wanted nothing more than to be by her side and hold her hand. On multiple occasions, she had to ask him to stop stroking her arm, as it was getting sore. Upon each departure, his eyes became red and teary and he kissed her multiple times before walking out the door. Whatever he remembers or not, nothing can interfere with the constant pain of leaving her. He never left her room without saying “I sure wish we could bring your mama home.”

I could only say, “Me too, Dad, me too.”

Despite it all, they are still the playful lovebirds they have always been. One day, the therapists introduced my Mom to a number of devices that will help her live more independently as she recovers. One of which is a grabber; a trigger operated claw at the end of a stick that helps her pull on clothing or reach something on the floor. As my Mom talked with my brother, David, on the phone, my Dad picked up the grabber and pinched my Mom on the leg, causing her to scold him with a smile. We all laughed and it warmed my heart for my brother, 3000 miles away, to hear evidence of our parents joking around and laughing, despite all the trauma. It felt so real; a perfect scene of normalcy and happiness in our family.

From the beginning, we were all focused on a singular goal: get them home. I felt that if her health would allow it, she should be at home with the family and her doctors. This became a kind of mission for me, probably a sort of penance. I will deliver her.

The nurses at the skilled nursing facility said she may be able to fly in “a week or two” when she was admitted. This gave us a timeline for looking for flights. A suggestion was made to fly business class so she could be more comfortable. Sachi took this as a challenge. She found three seats in business class on a red-eye direct to Charlotte on the following Saturday, exactly two weeks after the surgery. We reserved the seats and the next day heard from the nurses that they planned for her to be discharged the very same Saturday. Perfect. We now had an agreement with the nurses and a means to depart.

Over the next week, I added another section to Dad’s reminder note about the situation. I listed all the days of the week leading up to the expected departure. Each morning, I had him read the note and ceremoniously mark out the previous day and place an arrow beside the current one. Even though time isn’t a concrete part of his reality, this addition meant he could understand, at a glance, where we were in the process.

The closer we came to departure, the more my attention became focused on ensuring she stayed healthy. The only potential roadblock I saw was a Thursday follow-up appointment with the surgeon. As a nurse practitioner told me before the appointment, “If he says you’re grounded, you’re grounded.” I shuddered at the thought of having things so perfectly planned only to see them upended two days before departure.

The surgeon said she was healing perfectly, and thankfully, did not object to her traveling. On the way home from the day’s activities, two weeks after the fall, my Dad said to me, “Tell me what happened to Mom…”

On Saturday, her discharge day, I awoke with anxiety clouding every thought. The night before I dreamt that the nursing facility called to let me know she had developed an infection overnight and couldn’t travel. I called her that morning to check in. She was fine.

As we sat on the couch after breakfast before leaving to collect her, Dad asked, “Why isn’t Mom with us?”

I reminded him to look at the note in his shirt pocket. He read it over and over. I marked out Friday and circled Saturday.

After weeks of him asking about her, it was such a relief to say “Today’s the day, Dad, Mom is coming home and we’re going to fly to North Carolina tonight.” He smiled. The words visibly relaxed him, perhaps temporarily.

After her discharge, Mom was able to relax at our house where we created a bed on our couch with Dad at her side. For the first time on this visit, he napped in the afternoon.

That night we arrived at the airport and unloaded Mom and the collapsible wheelchair onto the airport sidewalk just like the one that tripped her. I saw the little grates between sidewalk sections and grimaced. I found myself feeling overprotective of her in the quick transition to the inside of the airport.

I was unsure how the metal detector situation would work, but assumed she wouldn’t be the first person to go through in her condition. Not thinking about it, I went through to receive her on the other side. To my surprise, they needed her to stand, walk a couple of yards to the body scanner, get scanned and walk out on her own. I could only watch from the other side and try to coerce the agents to help her more or allow me to. They assured me she would be fine. My only thought was “How the hell do you know what she can or can’t do? Do you know what she’s been through?” What we didn’t need was another fall at the airport.

Then, to top it all off, they said they detected metal around her waist area. I could only think, “Really? I just told you she just had a hip replacement. Could it possibly be the huge piece of titanium in her hip?” They didn’t care. It was policy. They had to do a full pat down.

Mom asked earnestly, looking up from a wheelchair, “Why are they doing this?”

I had so many answers, but ended up going with “They detected metal, so they need to make sure you don’t have a weapon.” She rolled her eyes.

In the end, we got through and boarded the plane. Mom was comfortable. Dad was a little confused but complacent and I was taking lots of deep breaths. My brother, Randy, picked us up and about nine hours after leaving our home in Seattle, we arrived in Kernersville, North Carolina. My parents were finally home.

In the first couple of days in North Carolina, I took them (my Dad goes everywhere she does) to the doctor and collected groceries and refilled prescriptions. I offloaded every bit of information I could to my brother, David, who will be on-point for Mom’s care. My mission was nearly over and I wanted to leave Kernersville with the confidence that I had done everything I could to make the situation better for Mom and Dad, and my family who were taking the reins.

At the time, Hurricane Florence was preparing to arrive on the coast as a category 4 or 5 and everyone was making contingency plans. I joked that I got them home just in time for the hurricane. My flight was scheduled to leave a few days later, but if it didn’t and I had to stay a little longer, I thought to myself it wouldn’t be that bad.

Over nearly three weeks, I had been their primary caretaker and it was a job that gave me an unexpected level of satisfaction. I relished being responsible and it became a kind of lifestyle. I didn’t think much about how my life had been turned upside down or what I had missed. All those details and plans seemed ephemeral in the face of the mission. But in the end, my job was done and thankfully, my Mom was on the road to a full recovery.

On Tuesday, 19 days after my Mom’s fall, I boarded a plane back to Seattle, put on my headphones, ordered a whisky and soda and took one more long, deep breath.

Lee LeFever writes about work and lifestyle at Camping on Tuesdays.

Jason Snell today published the article I've been itching to write, outlining the current mess that is Apple's watch face ecosystem. The Apple Watch in so many ways is in its best position ever, which makes the lack of coherence in Apple's watch face strategy particularly surprising.

As Apple continues to create new watch faces at a regular clip, those faces have grown more and more fragmented in what they can do. The Siri face introduced last year was an interesting new direction for watch faces, yet it remains one of a kind in many ways. The Series 4 Watch's Infograph faces come with a whole new set of complications, all of which are wonderful except that they don't work on other faces, nor do older complications work on the new faces. This lack of compatibility is frustrating enough, but what may be even more vexing is that Apple itself hasn't even provided new complications for all of its apps, only some of them – I'd love a Podcasts complication on my Infograph face, but it simply doesn't exist.

Snell offers up a handful of suggestions for where Apple should focus its watch face efforts going forward, all of which earn my total agreement. He writes:

Every face needs to be modernized and support the new complication styles, at least on Series 4. Key system apps and features like Messages and cellular status should be available on all faces. Every face design should be more flexible.

And moving forward, Apple should allow developers even more power in building complications. Complications should be able to appear when they have something to say and disappear when they don’t—for example, I’d love for a Timer complication to appear when I’m running a timer, but the rest of the time I’d rather not see it. If complications truly are the best face of Apple Watch apps, the developers of those apps need more power to build good ones.

Every one of these ideas is entirely reasonable, and would go a long way toward fixing the current watch face mess. I know we just got watchOS 5, but I hope watch faces are a strong area of focus for Apple in next year's watchOS 6.

→ Source: macworld.com

Today I had a bit of time to try running Mastodon on Raspberry Pi again. Last week I got stuck as some of the mentioned dependencies in the Mastodon installation guide could not be installed. As the step where I got stuck deals with a different Linux version, I tried simply skipping to the next step.

From the linked guide the steps ubuntu dependencies, node.js repository, yarn repository did not work.
The step after that, for various other dependencies, works again (which includes yarn actually).
Then a few steps follow that need to be executed as the specific user for mastodon. Installing ruby and node.js works fine, and almost all steps to install ruby and node.js dependencies. The final 2 steps of the dependencies throw errors (bundle install and yarn install). As at least some parts of the bundle install command do get executed, but not all. These are the last two steps before actually getting into configuring the installation, so it feels like being nearly there.

I’d have to dive deeply into the logfiles to see what wasn’t installed and what is missing. Not sure if I will easily find time to do so, and if I would actually understand what the log files tell me. It is also unclear if there is a relationship with the three steps I have skipped earlier in the process as they didn’t work.