View from Chaos Manor, Friday, January 16, 2015
Monday, January 19, 2015
Friday: I am posting a stub to work on later. Larry Niven and Wendy All are to be here shortly. (Well they got here as I was writing that.)
Monday : They were here and we worked on an old children’s book we started a decade ago. The story is complete or very nearly so, but Wendy has been so busy designing toys for Mattel that she has not completed the illustration – Now she can, and we will soon have the book ready to publish. It is a fairy tale about intelligent moles who are just discovering science and the scientific method, which they can employ in their war against the semi intelligent Weasels. A bit fantastic (but fantasies are), but it’s a pretty good story, for 8 and above kids who are not thrilled by talking sponges…
Saturday and Sunday were devoured by locusts, exercises, the exhausting drama of getting to church where Roberta sings in the choir and I sit in one of the handicap seats. I go in with the walker, which I am getting pretty good with. There are steps down into the garage that have to be taken, but the Holy Cross rehab therapists built a model of the steps when I was out there. They used little platforms, and we worked out the procedures to negotiate a double step down through a narrow doorway – down is harder than up – and all is well. Walkers work, a bit better than canes, and I got used to a cane after the cancer therapy radiation in 2008 destroyed y balance. I have got about 80% of what balance I had before the stro9ke, and now the key will be to do enough of the right exercises to be strong enough to overcome balance problems. A month in hospital even with physical and occupational therapy – they are not the same – can weaken you a lot. My advice to stroke victims is not to waste time – exercise as much as you can as early as you can.
More on that later. Thanks to all of you who renewed subscriptions or subscribed last month and this year. It is a life saver and I am catching up on the ability to type faster so I can do essays. The brain is still in here, although I wonder if the world is going mad…
Eric was here all day Saturday and we have solved a lot of the problems of computer connections. Need couple of fixes, but I can do the accounts and taxes down here in the old office now. Slowly getting back to normal
I’ll post this now and start today’s essay. Stand by…
The wireless connect on this lap top is slow, but it is almost good enough
.Monday: I am going to catch up on Mail, some of which is important.
So there is mail. Now let’s look at the day… First I am realizing how dependent I am on the Internet working right. It’s slow today, meaning Time Warner is slow, which is the way things were in 2004 or so before I got high speed Internet at all. I lived with it then, now it drives me crazy. So it goes. What cannot be cured… Over time these things fix themselves, and we are so much better off than we were that the improvements are the new normal. When the Franks got to Constantinople, the Byzantines wanted to impress them with their opulence so they served them oranges and fresh vegetables in mid-winter. The height of delight available only to the wealthiest… Now it is a right of the poor – in America. We do not notice that most of the world does not have fresh vegetables except in harvest time. Or oranges at all.
Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right
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* Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record.’
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* But it emerged that GISS’s analysis is subject to a margin of error
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* Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all
ltm
‘The NASA climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.’
Roland Dobbins
hmmm
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.