I’ve walked over a million meters playing Pokémon GO. As of right now, 1,059,500 meters. So I guess it is good for exercise, though I walk faster when I’m not catching Pokémon.

I first read this as an essay in the New Yorker in 1980, then read the book. I’m not at all sure that I have absorbed the wisdom. From the first page: “The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.”

That is a really creepy observation from 37 years ago when applied to Donald Trump in 2017.

The New Yorker has the first page of the original essay on their website. Check it out: “Within the Context of No Context“.

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A guy fashion crisis is when they stop making the shoes I’ve been wearing for the last 12 years. That is because “guy shopping” is buying the same thing in the same size as quickly as possible. But sometimes, I get wild.

My L.L. Bean field watch finally died after the most recent battery replacement. It had a good 15 or 20 years, not quite sure how long. I’ve been wearing earlier versions of the watch for decades. This one lasted longer because it had a flat mineral crystal. I’m pretty good at banging my watch against things and breaking the crystal.

This time, I decided to level up, but it took a while to find a watch that I really liked. This radical departure is a Seiko Kinetic Field Watch with a 5M82 movement. It was surprisingly hard to figure out if it had the features I wanted, like stopping the second hand (hacking), and not replacing the battery (Seiko Kinetic uses a spinning weight to charge a capacitor).

Oh, yes, I replaced the strap with a G10 NATO strap. And surprise, there is a dedicated tool for dealing with the spring bars (instead of using a screwdriver and scratching the watch case like I’ve done forever).

I just read a very good article that takes too long to get to the point. The “tl;dr” version is that Google and Apple were competing head to head for a while, but might be evolving to complementary areas, Apple with personal experience (ResearchKit, CareKit) and Google with big data analysis (diagnosing diabetic retinopathy).

Best quote: “Throw incomprehensible amounts of information at an enormous amount of computing power and basically brute-force a treatment protocol that functions better than humans ever could.”

Of course, this doesn’t work for Kevin’s genetic syndrome. He’s the only one with that particular mutation. A single case is not exactly “incomprehensible amounts of information”. We will still need the amazing inductive instrument inside our heads.

The author misses that humans decide the target for that incomprehensible/enormous tool.

Also, don’t use “incomprehensible” about information around me. I can comprehend extremely large amounts of information. I’m OK with “number of atoms in the universe”. Yes, I took two years of philosophy, so I know about the ontological argument. Personally, I’m with Tillich and process theology.

This is my letter about the pending sale of KTRU to the University of Houston. Friends of KTRU will forward it to the FCC as an out-of-area comment.

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I just received an e-mail from Rice President David Leebron explaining the sale of KTRU’s spectrum, transmitter, and antenna to the University of Houston. This will give KUHF two powerful transmitters for their NPR and classical music snoozefest, replacing the eclectic voice of Rice. Leebron pointed out that KTRU’s Arbitron numbers were invisible, that the $9.5 million from the sale would help fund the new East Servery (kitchen), and that the station would continue on the Internet at ktru.org.

I was a KTRU DJ from 1979 to 1981 and I helped install the new antenna on top of Sid Rich that finally got the signal beyond the hedges.

I sent him this reply.

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Lovely observation from Katja Grace:

Things can be obvious if they are simple. If something complicated is obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the implications it seems to.

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You know you are about to talk to a human when you get the warning “your call may be recorded …”. It took about 30 minutes and four different phone numbers to get to that point after our AT&T U-Verse service went out at 4:45PM. A bit over four hours later, we’re reconnected to the tubes.

We have a technician visit scheduled for tomorrow between 8 and 12, but I have no way to tell AT&T that our connection works now. Sigh.

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Ron Galloway has posted an odd article, What The Sundance Festival Can Learn From TED. Part of the oddness is that I can’t quite tell what he thinks Sundance should take from TED. I think he says that Sundance should be “about ideas” and make the presentations available for free, but that doesn’t really make sense.

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Driving back to school yesterday, my son saw a Nissan Titan truck and pointed out that the Nissan car names are “epic”: Titan, Altima, Maxima. Smart guy.

I agree with Plain Jane Mom, this first story, She’s happily married, dreaming of divorce, is about the most depressing thing I’ve ever read about a “good” marriage.

There are so many things wrong about this. Leaving your shoes in the way isn’t even being a good roommate, let alone a good husband. Writing your complaints in O: The Oprah Magazine instead of going to counseling is a cheat. This is isn’t source material, it is your marriage.

Some of it hardly sounds real. Does she really believe that every wife thinks of divorce as a security blanket, that it is “the closely held contemplation of nearly every woman I know who has children who have been out of diapers for at least two years and a husband who won’t be in them for another 30.”?

Of course married people think seriously about divorce, as Ambrose Bierce said, “Who never doubted, never half believed.” But to treasure it? To call it a “secret reverie”? Dear Abby would tell you to get to a marriage counselor. Get some coaching in being human to each other, talking, living. It works, we’ve done it.

After that has thoroughly bummed you out, or perhaps, after you skip it, read John Scalzi on losing wedding rings and his tenth anniversary. It is full of the shared life, secret jokes, and surprises that only happen when you live together and love each other for that long.

Until recently, my only relative with any serious claim to fame was my cousin Sherry, who set the world record in the women’s marathon in 1971. She had a number of “firsts” — first woman with an athletic scholarship at a public university, first woman on the cover of Runner’s World, designer of the first running bra for women with larger breasts (designed after she had kids), and so on. There is a great interview with her (Cheryl Treworgy) that goes over a lot of the early history, including a male runner trying to force her off the road during her world record run. These days, she is a track and field photojournalist, with her photos at prettysporty.com.

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Driving to work this morning, I was squirting some particularly resistant goo off the windshield. About when I had partial success, the BMW behind me zipped around, pulled in front of me, squirted their windshield washers, then changed lines to get onto 280. Sigh. It is sad when someone needs vengeance about tiny things. I somehow doubt that driver will have a long and happy life.

He did help get more of the goo off my windshield, though.