Go to space?

I think the problem with space exploration is simply that we are primitive, we only understand things which give us economic benefits within a decade. Going to space is just something we have to do on a longer scale, hundreds of years. Not doing it is equivalent of a tribe staying within a few miles of their village generation after generation. In the long run, they won’t survive and they certainly won’t prosper and be great.

Update:
By the way, I’m reading the “Bobiverse” series by Dennis E. Taylor. It’s excellent hard SF about robotised human minds colonizing other systems. Funny too.

Dear reader

I really appreciate that despite this blog being less active recently, it still has thousands of readers. That’s great. As some know, I’ve had health issues, like a heart attack last year, and I’m not fully recovered yet, but I’ve made progress and I will strive to post more here. Thanks guys.

“I realized that so far most of my movies I’d had a gun in my hand, and I thought ‘what is the value of that really?’.”
 - Clint Eastwood

 (On The Actors’ Studio, about why his movies changed to more peaceful ones.)

Stewie and the women

I gotta tell this one. One time, I was in the hospital, and next to me was a man, let’s call him Steward, who was eighty years old if he was a day. Stewie had something that women liked, I don’t know what it was, he seemed ordinary to me (if quite pleasant), not tall or anything. But he shaved and washed every day, carefully combed his hair, and I’ve never seen anybody more popular with women. Eighty years old, and he was the only man I’ve ever seen nurses actually flirt with.

Stewie’s family, including his wife, visited him all the time. But he also got another visitor: a woman approaching ‘a certain age’, but still clearly a man’s woman. She was dark and exotic, long black curly hair, sexy and stylish dress... When she came in, she sort of posed by his bed for a minute, not saying anything, just smiling. It was somehow clear those two had a long history.

Now... how to tell this... at one point, during her visit, she got closer to him. She did not even close the curtains around the bed, but she got very close to him and... took him in hand, so to speak. Ahem. It took only a couple of minutes, and Stewie never got loud, but I think he got quite satisfied.
After, she pulled up his covers again, and threw out a paper towel and washed her hands.
Soon after, she left, with a little smile at me.

Net use and mood

Hmmm... I seem to be having some experiences which may be confirming what some studies have hinted at: that too much Net use, perhaps particularly social media, has an unfortunate effect on mood.

I'm pretty sure there is *something* there, the problem is just that logically it does not make sense to me. Just because it's on a screen, why should it be different from letters, or books, or films, or telephone? I would think it's all just different ways of communications, no?

Highly Sensitive Persons

She is quite wise. 

I read the book years ago, and it helped me. 

And already back in the early nineties I was aware that I was a Highly Sensitive Person, though the term had not been invented yet, so I called it hyper-sensitive. 

It's a dog's life, but even a dog can get a nice bone. 

Video

Wall, tree, light

Light.
Click for big pic.

Rental time limits are dumb

I've had some considerable success with online content selling, and I think that one really stupid thing the movie owners are doing with online rentals is limiting the time you have to watch the movie to thirty days. I don't see anything they gain from this, but I do see one important thing they lose: it makes the buyer be more reluctant to rent more movies at a time, because of fear of not getting around to them before they expire. 

If instead they would set the limit to five years, or why not just forever, then, like I do with my Kindle book library, I would rent many more movies (especially at a three-dollar price), in the comfortable knowledge that they will sit there waiting for me until the day I have the time to watch them. I have at least a hundred books in my Kindle library I have not read yet, and I would not have bought them if there had been a time limit. 

(I think with digital content the difference between owning and renting is largely academic, there are few books I read more than once. (And by the way, why don't they rent out ebooks, at half the selling price? They'd go like fresh cakes.))

Late light photos from today

Canon GX7 II.
Click for big pic.

The iPhone: a saviour, a disaster, or both?

"To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones."

Article

Be a gentleman (or a lady)

Can you live with people who speak harshly to you? 

I have virtually never spoken (much less shouted) harshly or angrily to anybody. I consider it uncivilized, uncool, ungentlemanlike, primitive, and counter-productive. 

And I don't tolerate if people do it to me. (That is very rare, fortunately.) Correction: if they change their mind and apologizes, I can forgive them. But I neither will or can live with anybody who treats me like a dog. (Actually even dogs shouldn't be treated like that.) 

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It's the thing I find very disappointing about a person like the late Steve Jobs (and he was far from unique). He clearly found it to be an acceptable way of dealing with people. I simply don't understand that. How can you be an educated person of sophisticated taste and a high post, and yet regularly treat other people in ways that are on the level of mindless animals, generating fear and intimidated or offended people around you? How can an educated person live with himself not being a gentleman? 

Stormy weather

Amazing time lapse storm videos.