Member Posts

Entry tags:

cooking

(cooking)

Yesterday i made a marvelous soup -- dried figs, chickpeas, and a can of fire roasted tomato with half a jar of harissa sauce. Blitzed up some of the figs, chickpeas, and tomatoes, but kept it chunky. The only issue is when i dried the figs i left the stems on. I usually blend them up when making my buckwheat bread (blending with the buckwheat) and between the long fermenty soaks and the blending, i have never noticed the stems. Noticed this time. Other than that, divine.

I'm trying to decide if buying The Spice House's Harissa mix is worth it. (https://www.thespicehouse.com/blogs/recipes/20-minute-harissa-spread) This resource (https://www.chefs-resources.com/culinary-conversions-calculators-and-capacities/dry-spice-yields/) says 4.25 tablespoons per oz, so it's roughly 5 batches of the recipe. (OMG olive oil prices.) I will buy Tampa resident nephew who fishes and cooks two Hawaiian sea salts and Sichuan peppercorns for Yule, and NYC student nephew maybe a popcorn seasoning and a baked potato seasoning, and then i start looking for me and i want all the flavors.

The mix is probably not worth it. The sauce i bought may have sugar in it and leads with water, but it was fine (not too garlicy).

Moonlit walk

I got in my quick walk last night and reveled in being able to see the clear gold and yellow leaves in the moonlight. It seems so remarkably glorious this year, like the leaves are all changing at once. The early brown leaves -- well copper-brown from the black cherry -- are past and fallen. I am outside this morning in hood, jacket, gloves and throw. I can see a low horizon to the back of the woods where the hill falls off this morning.

( Images from the walk )

Current Mood: contemplative

Entry tags:

Wordless Wednesday: Sign of the Times

Image: A sign posted near every high roof at my school campus, reading “There is hope. We are here to listen.” (With a phone number to call.)¹

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
—Emily Dickinson

__________
¹ I’m feeling a bit somber contemplating the necessity for signs like that to be put up around rooftops but at the same time heartened at the thought that someone took the effort to place them there and to set up a support line people can call if they’re feeling overwhelmed.*

*I know it’s “Wordless Wednesday” but I’m pretty sure footnotes don’t count as real words, right?

Current Mood: tired

Entry tags:

Scams of the Past: The Phonics Game

IN today’s episode of “Famous Scams of the Past,” we’ll take a look at an item that dominated the airwaves with ads years ago—The Phonics Game. (“What’s that?” I hear you asking, “You never had ‘episodes’ of any such thing, what’s going on?” A fair question. I don’t know, it’s just a turn of phrase to introduce the topic. But talking about scams and history can be fun, so who knows? I might do more in the future.)

Anyway, back in the mid-1990s Dr. Greg Cynaumon came out with this revolutionary new way to teach kids to read. He called it “The Phonics Game” and he claimed it was so amazing, so unprecedented and powerful, that if your child didn’t get a full letter-grade improvement on their next report card after using the game, you’d get your money back.

Pretty cool, right? Well, there was some controversy that came to life along with the excited interest from parents looking for anything to help their kids who were struggling with reading skills. (And considering the game’s creator also suffered the embarrassment of getting in legal hot water with the FTC for selling diet pills that didn’t quite live up to their advertising, controversy seems to follow his business ventures more than I’m sure he’d prefer.)

I seem to recall it getting to the point where it was—at least in the circles I inhabited—increasingly viewed by consumers as something of a scam product. I just filed it away as a curiosity until I had kids of my own who were having a tough time learning to read too, and it occurred to me to wonder if something like this game might be helpful, or if indeed it was a scam or money-making scheme more than an educational tool. So we bought a copy for our kids and took a look first-hand.

In my opinion, I came to the personal conclusion that it was a bit of both: a viable educational tool and a bit of a scam as well.

What was actually wrong with it, then? They had this fantastic money-back offer, how bad could it be? The answer to that is foreshadowed by its name. It teaches reading using the phonics method (itself the subject of some controversy, but for people of my generation, this is better known simply as “the way we were all taught to read as kids”). It’s basic, it’s simple, whether or not there’s a better teaching method, phonics has been proven to at least work well enough for a long time now. And for this product they turned it into a set of entertaining games to keep kids’ attention. So far, so good.

Gamification of teaching materials is nothing new and is also a time-honored approach (even for adult education), so nothing wrong with that. Does it actually work, though? In our experience, yes. Yes, it does. It actually seemed to work quite well, to be honest.

So what’s the scam part of this?

I think the only part of this that’s shady is the marketing and sales of the actual game. They hyped it up as some amazing new thing that would work like magic in your kids’ lives, and for that they charged a premium price—over $225 for the game (about $500 in 2025 dollars). But then what price can you put on pure magic that teaches your kids to read, after all?

I learned to read before I went to Kindergarten by using something more or less akin to phonics. For free. As wonderful as this game is, it should probably more reasonably have a price around 10% of what they were charging for it. They made a nice game around it but not that much more to justify that price tag.¹

A little corporate greed ruined an otherwise nice idea. Can’t say that was the fist, nor will it be the last time that’s happened in this world.

Together, we can assemble amazing words and astounding tales.
—Ollie Kayuro
Fairytale Clues: Magic-filled Stories That Slip English Grammar into the Heart

__________
¹We got our copy for a much more reasonable price on eBay from another family who had used it and wanted to pass it along to someone else at that point.

Current Mood: exhausted

Entry tags:

A to Z

THIS is a meme I’ve seen around here and there, offered as a fun way to introduce yourself to new readers, which seems about right as NaBloPoMo kicks off here. The idea is to pick 26 words that somehow describe you. Some of them may be a bit of a stretch since the letters that are worth more in Scrabble are harder to work into things like this.

A is for Aardvark, or more formally, the Aardvark Computing Society, the geekiest of the geek clubs in my high school. Legend has it that the name was chosen as a “hack” so they’d be listed first in the yearbook.
B is for board games. I have always had a love for playing interesting board games. “Interesting” in this sense tends to have a direct correlation to how many little pieces come in the box, and how many scores of pages the rule book is. Complexity can be fun! My current favorite is Return to Dark Tower, but there are many that have held my interest at this point.
C is for Computer Science, my field of expertise, what my degrees are in, and what I’m grateful every day that people actually pay me to do for a living, despite the fact I’d do it for fun anyway.
D is for D&D, a game I’ve enjoyed playing since I was a teenager. (Although technically we moved from D&D to Pathfinder a few years ago.)
E is for Eagle. I slid onto the plate with this one, finishing the requirements too close for comfort before my 18th birthday, but I’m glad now, looking back on it, that I put in the effort to get this rank while I was in Scouts. It proved to me that I was capable of doing something challenging and was something I encouraged my kids to reach for as well.
F is for family. One of the most important things in my life.
G is for The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a macabre little book by Edward Gorey that describes the unpleasant fates of 26 children in A-B-C style. (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so forth.) I had a poster form of the book up in my apartment at college, just showing off my darker sense of humor, but it ended up creeping out my roommates too much, which was also amusing but I took pity on them and took it down.
H is for hovercraft. As a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus since I was a teenager, I made sure that as long as I was going to the trouble to learn another language, I had to learn how to say that iconic phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (Which, if you’re curious, is something like 我的氣墊船充滿了鱔魚—wǒde qìdiánchuàn chōngmǎn le shànyú.)
I is for ice storms, something we survived several winters when I was a kid. It usually amounted to a week without power sometime in January while the city was paralyzed with all the streets covered in a layer of ice.
J is for journal, this thing I’m writing in now, which has proven to be a great way to remember all the things that have happened in my life over the last few decades.
K is for Kermit, in tribute to how much I used to love the Muppets as a kid.
L is for labels. Our family started a tradition of using barcode labels instead of gift tags at Christmas, so the kids wouldn’t peek or open any gifts until Christmas Day (and more to the point, a reasonable time on Christmas Day) because they couldn’t tell which gifts were theirs until we unlocked the codes so they could scan them to find out.
M is for Magic: the Gathering, a great card game I’ve enjoyed. Also, an indicator of how geeky my wife and I are—we brought our Magic cards with us on our honeymoon and played a game or two in the card room on the cruise ship.
N is for nature, a place I like to occasionally go visit to relax and unwind.
O is for optimistic, something I tend to be, probably to a fault.
P is for programming, my favorite pastime.
Q is for quilts. A lot of my childhood memories involve my mom’s quilt frames set up in the living room as she worked on sewing one quilt after another.
R is for Ragnarok, the best Multi-User Dungeon game on the Internet. And where I met my wife, so it’s kind of special to us.
S is for Science Fiction, one of my favorite genres of fiction (along with Fantasy). Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Lathe of Heaven, so many more, each with an interesting story to tell.
T is for Tolkien, who contributed so much to Fantasy literature and folklore that I’ve enjoyed most of my life.
U is for unusual. I love being unconventional in creative ways.
V is for volcano, something I live in the shadow of. A few volcanoes, actually. Never gave them much thought until the spring of 1980, when one we thought had been extinct decided to erupt and wipe out the summer camp we were planning to go to that year. And dumped volcanic ash all over us just to complete the bargain.
W is for whodunit. I don’t read mysteries often enough, but I enjoy trying to figure them out before the big reveal.
X is sort of for eXtreme programming, a novel new way of organizing the work of a team of programmers, invented by a friend of mine and his associates.
Y is for Yendor. I spent many hours earlier in my life in pursuit of the Amulet of Yendor, the ultimate prize in the computer game Rogue.
Z is for zen. I don’t subscribe specifically to the discipline of that name, but the general appeal of finding my mental place of calm and focus is something I often feel, to recharge in the middle of the hectic chaos of my life.

My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
—Dr. Seuss
On Beyond Zebra

Entry tags:

(morning writing, depression, cats, orchard, greycatnext )

Time flies by so fast. Maybe it will slow down a little: yesterday i felt the depression break as i was deglazing the pan in which had fried up polenta, onions, radishes, and fennel. This was the second iteration of the lunch (second half of the fennel bulb), and i had been delighted -- maybe just pleased, or proud, really-- with the lunch before (despite the depression). But i felt it yesterday.

And despite the depression, i have acknowledged how lovely this fall has been. Very yellow and gold when i wish for more red and orange. The buckeye dropped its leaves before i could enjoy their orange during the drought, but a dogwood in the back is nice and red. I wish to grow sumac and enjoy their red. The persimmon and blueberries will be red sometime, but not yet. But! Really, quite a lovely yellow and gold. I'm not feeling the "ugh more yellow" feeling i have had previous years. The purple (bright pink?) chrysanthemums and the continuing lantana blooms have helped. (Slight shame at non-native landscaping, but the ironweed is over.)

The Fuyu-style persimmons have been wonderful this year. I suppose there's still a chance of persimmons on the native tree. I am admittedly not letting them get all the way ripe, so they aren't honeyed sweet. Still learning how to pick them.

We gave Bruno a long break from Marlowe and he was coming out of his retreat. Saturday we took him to our bedroom and closed him in there, allowing me to do a deep vacuum of the front room. We rearranged the furniture, moved in the glorious cat litter cabinet (a cabinet enclosing a custom made insert that creates a easy to clean, very large litter space), and hung one of my grandmother's paintings behind where i sit at work. We rotated the bed and it feels more roomy - -and also many of the boxes are now stacked where the cabinet was. (Lots of self criticism about all the Stuff stashed, and the fact that this is really the first art i've hung since we moved in -- at least now all the art stashed in the closet might be more easily accessed.)

Sunday Marlowe slipped by me to instigate a screaming match with Bruno under the bed. Bruno seems less traumatized than before, but i do think he's holding to safe spaces more than he was.

Hints at other things from the weekend and yesterday: Rising moon -- Death faire -- Wisdom circle ponderings power vs strength -- grief about ITP and fatigue & "you don't have reason to indulge in feelings" inner response & interrogation revealing a particular point in the landscape from my middle school-first years of high school home -- green wall coming down -- spicebush yellow under the invasive blue green silverberry -- investing in plant stands for summer hanging planters -- disgust at the cruelty of US administration.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: VKunia—Reaction video to The Princess Bride

Entry tags:

FF:LJ→DW

I have been holding onto this Friday Fiver for a couple of weeks, mostly just because I haven’t got around to posting anything for a while. But somehow it seems apropos enough to bring out here as I start NaBloPoMo and have the topic of online journaling on my mind.

As usual, this Friday Five is brought to you by the letter F and the number 5, courtesy of sumrsue79 and posted to thefridayfive by anais_pf.¹

How long ago did you join LJ (or DW)?
I started my LiveJournal in October, 2003. This comes after a lifetime of growing up being taught that keeping a personal journal or diary is one of life’s highest virtues and something I was really strongly encouraged to do from an early age. The small stack of empty journals I was given as gifts over the years attests to how well that worked out. Having not had my ADHD diagnosed until much, much later in life may have been a factor, but generally speaking it was just very difficult for me to sit down and organize my thoughts in a permanent fashion like a pre-bound journal in ink. And when I did, I was paralyzed any time I missed writing anything because I couldn’t just carry on with a gap without completely and perfectly filling in all the missing bits first, so I could never catch up and thus every attempt was soon abandoned.
Fast forward to 2003. I’m allegedly a grown-up with a real life, job, marriage, pets, house, and as a father of young kids, I realized that there were a lot of memories, experiences, and thoughts going by that would be lost in the wind if I didn’t somehow manage to get myself to write them down along the way.
I found that a few of my friends were blogging on LiveJournal and on an impulsive whim I signed up, thinking I’d just post an occasional random thought here or there, but before I knew it I was full-on chronicling my life. Somehow I found the medium where that actually worked for me.
After a while, LJ was bought out by a company that changed the terms of service—including the concerning bit about everything posted there being subject to terms that were only available in Russian.² Plus, apparently it included something about how everything posted would be considered under Russian law as if posted by a media outlet with serious consequences if you said anything that in their view was controversial or restricted.
I didn’t sign up for any of that nonsense just to keep my personal journal, which isn’t a political media outlet at all, other than as a human being I have a few opinions about things. So along with a number of other LJ refugees, I moved my journal over to Dreamwidth, which is a nearly identical platform (technically) which still has the home-grown volunteer-effort feel to it.
How did you find out about LJ (or DW)?
I guess I already answered that in the previous question.
If someone introduced you to LJ (or DW), is s/he still on your friends list?
Yes, technically, but sadly times have changed. The crowds of people I used to follow and interact with between all our LJ and DW journals (and blogs on other sites as well) faded away as people were more drawn to quick sound bites on Facebook (etc.) over writing longer, more thoughtful discourse in the blogosphere.
So while the friends who were the ones who introduced me to LJ originally are still on my friends list, they’re not active there anymore (or on DW).
Have you introduced anyone to LJ (or DW)?
Yes, a few, mostly just in the same way I was introduced. In a casual conversation, something I wrote about in my blog would come up and I would suggest the idea of checking out blogs to them, or some similar way of introduction.
Is your LJ (or DW) public or friends only, and why?
It started out friends-only because at the time my kids were still growing up and I was writing a lot about our family activities and life experiences, and just for the sake of due diligence of online safety, I didn’t want the entire universe unchecked access to all of that, so I managed access to those who asked first so at least there was some sense I knew who my audience was.
These days, now that those days are past us, I’ve opened up my journal to be mostly public and the content is more focused on more general life topics since I’m not raising kids anymore at this point in my life.

The bravest journey is the one within.
—Amanda Lee

__________
¹To play along, copy these questions to your journal/blog, answer them and post a link back as a comment in

thefridayfive.
²They provided an English translation for our convenience but didn’t guarantee anything about its accuracy in any legally-binding way, so we were still at the mercy of whatever the Russian text said.

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

November and NaBloPoMo Amidst the Madness of Life

NOVEMBER. Already? November. It was just November a little bit ago. And with the start of the month of course comes the commencement of National Blog Posting Month, which helps me get motivated to write down a few more of my thoughts and experiences in this, my journal of my life’s thoughts and experiences.

Trouble is, there’s so much going on that sometimes it’s hard to feel like I can justify the time to stop to write any of them down. And right now, I’m deep in the middle of work toward a deadlilne looming for my degree, so I can’t guarantee a post a day here, or that they will all be any kind of pithy or deep thought-provoking ideas but I’ll try to post something and maybe with luck a few bits of humor or interest will show up, purely by accident.

Your PhD is doing its best to grind you down. If you’re not careful, your PhD will take over your life.
—Maureen Lipman

Entry tags:

(morning writing, 354, concerns, work)

In "why for is everything falling apart?" news, my key to the car has stopped working, and replacing the battery did not seem to help. The tube inside my rain gauge is leaking, and so there have been times where I thought I thought I emptied the bigger tube and I didn't know what to do with the measurement of the water in the inside of the tube. On Wednesday, I became confident that basically that water just leaked out of the inside tube. This is really annoying because it's a new inner measuring tube to replace one that had cracked at the top.

My new watch arrived and didn't pair with my phone until i took the case off the phone. Which... maybe would have worked with the old watch? It's a splurge but i think i will keep this new one: it's a much better fit as the previous watch was a good bit larger.

I did get outside and raked a little last night. Yay for movement. I think i have been terribly sedentary for the past year and a half, and there's weight gain over this past year and my blood work drawn on Monday had some signals that it is now time to focus on turning this around. Movement will help my mood, i am sure, so there's that.

I am very torn about the continued US government shut down. More people are joining the hostages being held against resolution of ... i'm not even sure it's a budget. Just a continuing resolution. But "continuing" in the current direction is pretty bad. This is lack of leadership.

In happy, geeky news, i have been delighted to discover the frictionless project and the v2 data package standard: https://datapackage.org/ . It is nifty to have a standard way to describe tabular data so that it's fairly easy to automate loading and reuse of the data. The joy of fiddling with this has made one of my tedious fiscal-year work goals a little more interesting. While technically the goal has nothing to do with data, i have to do the same research for eight different software packages and a different set of analysis and team wrangling for ... ten? work-written applications. I automated making markdown checklists and report templates yesterday for the eight, and have a notebook to explore the data i screen-scraped from the work database about the eight software packages. (An api account to access the ServiceNow database costs money so i shall continue with screen scraping.)

Entry tags:

skating

Today in figure skating practice

Me, practicing a spiral on my bad leg: Huh, it feels like if I try to tip my upper body forward any more, I'm gonna fall over the toe pick.
Me: Does it anyway, because that's what you're supposed to do and my coach is always trying to get me to push myself
Me: Falls over the toe pick

That's why I bought the knee pads and the padded gloves!

Spiral on the bad leg is also a bit shakier than usual since it's the ankle I hurt falling down the stairs a few months back, and I'm still rebuilding ankle strength in more challenging positions... which means I need to practice on that side more 😤

Entry tags:

morning writing

(morning writing)

Well, that was a thing. I took a long weekend, and there were ups and downs.

Thursday and Saturday night took nice long dog walks at dusk in the nearby mega-development along trails and lamp-lit streets. Carrie and i went with my sister and her dog on Thursday, returned with Christine on Saturday.

Friday night i saw my niece in as the lead in "She Kills Monsters," which is about the relationship between an older sister and her younger deceased sister, in which the elder realizes that assumptions that her younger sister was cisgender or heterosexual were not necessarily correct. It was a little surreal to watch sitting next to my younger sister, while watching my niece play opposite her girlfriend.

Sunday i met up with my sister and dad at a house he's looking at in between the two of us. I hope he jumps on buying it. [News: he's decided not to move again. Oh well.]

I spent lots of time resurrecting coding environment in my laptop, using mise to handle dependencies and environment along with poetry for python. Had a headache getting my diagramming tool container running. I think i was just (1) trying to run on a port with something else on it and then (2) had conflicts with the development environment user/workspace/folder configurations. Instead i chased the container management system, switching to a new system, and fiddled forever with ai assisted node scripts (i don't know javascript really) to see if there were firewalls etc etc oh good grief. Very cranky making.

And my project was aligning my records of absences with work's. By definition, work is correct for previous years, and it seems the offset errors are in previous years. So i put in offset corrections. But that was fussy and annoying. However, i learned about "frictionless" data manifests. That delights me no end. In general i am trying to learn to manage things "right" in semi-standard idiom and patterns. Over the past few months i've developed a personal style guide (leaning heavily on work's) and a workspace template. This was the first time trying to get the template running at home, so, yes, some bumps.

CPAP has been stopping in the middle of the night and my ("smart") watch started dying within hours of a full charge. Sunday morning i woke in a terrible mood because i had awakened 03:30ish to a watch with just 3% battery after going to bed with a day and 21 hours of charge. I also woke to no air. I couldn't fall back asleep, so i ended up spending hours trying to factory reset and reconnect to my phone with no luck. I think i found some setting that will fix the CPAP behavior: i didn't know if i was turning it off in the middle of the night myself, but last night i slept well.

This morning i had to fast -- including NO TEA!! -- for a "wellness" blood draw to get a $500 reduction on my health insurance premium. I think it will be worth it. I stopped in the past because it was all very intrusive with lots of participation in online portals that seemed pretty annoying. This year it simply (it seems?) requires a bio-metric screening. What i don't know is if the coaching is triggered by being pre-diabetic or simply a BMI trigger. It doesn't seem that one has to engage with the coaching to get the reduction in the premium. I trust my doctor, i don't need an algorithm. Anyhow, i survived the fasting by not taking my vitamin B in the morning, and beat back the caffeine withdrawal with coffee.

I did get blue and have had lots of self recrimination about not being outside this vacation. But trying to accept my focus. We did have a lovely Sunday dinner with a Quorn roast (mushroom based protein loaf) with home-grown chestnuts among the carrots, onions, and potatoes, and a cranberry relish with home-grown persimmons and spice bush spices. I thought i might have overdone it with the spice bush, using all of last year's frozen pulps+sugar. Fortunately Christine still loved the relish, and i was motivated while it was cooking to get this year's second harvest of pulps separated from seeds. (The first harvest went bad in the fridge as i neglected it.) By the time of the second harvest some of the spice bush berries had dried out on the shrub. People often dry them whole, so i had some of those ground over slices of persimmon for breakfast for several days: also yummy.

Entry tags:

technomagic

Staring into the (void)NULL

I've done some research into software design lately, and one of my key findings was how powerful it is to use null objects.

One of the fundamental issues with software is how to represent "hey, I couldn't find that thing you were looking for". Most languages have some form of version of this, but basically they all share the issue that if you try to figure something out about the thing you were handed, you'll get an error thrown in your face. This is obviously not helpful, and it means your code will be full of checks for this problem. Sure, you can omit them, but sooner or later something unexpected will happen, causing a software crash.

Enter the humble null object. At its core, this is the same type of object you were looking for, it just happens to be blank. I like to be fancy and give it some kind of checker method so you can ask "Is this actually blank or a real thing?" - if you really needed to know. But usually, you can just go ahead and ask it's name, date of birth or whatever. Only thing is they will all be blank.

Null objects go hand in hand a more functional style of programming. To explain, here is a small code sample:


var user = repository.FindByKey("Galahad");
if (user == null) throw new IDontKnowError();
var colours = user.FavouriteColours();
var blue = colours.FindByKey("Blue");
if (blue != null) colours.Remove(blue);

That's your bog standard way of doing this. Now try this in a functional way

repository.FindByKey("Galahad") // might return a null object, but keep going
    .FavouriteColours() // if the user is a null object, this is another null object
    .FindByKey("blue") // could also be a null object
    .Remove();   // For null objects, does nothing

This might seem like a trivial change, but it makes the code much easier to deal with. Having any kind of lookup return a null object just means you can chain these things together with no need for error checking in your business logic. To be sure, there are checks, they're just hidden where you don't need to worry about them. 99% of the time, you're not working at a level where these things should matter.

Personally, I've found that this kind of approach really changes the way I write, making the result automatically more robust in the face of unexpected data. Of course, if I really need to throw errors in some cases, I can do so easily:

var item = repository.FindByKey("Coconuts");
if (item.IsNull())
    throw new CannotMakePinaColadaError();

Entry tags:

fluff,
science

The Metric system is bonkers

Oh hey, new post [1].

I've been watching a few videos on metrics and imperial system, and I've decided that the metric system is bonkers. Not that the other one is better...

To start with, let's look at our basic units of measurement.
Distance - 1 metre is 1/10 000 000 of the distance between the North Pole and the equator, measured along the Paris meridian [2].
Volume - 1 litre is derived from the metre, or rather 1 litre = 1 dm³ or 1/1000 of 1 metre³.
Mass - 1 kilogram is the mass of 1 litre of water, or 1/1000 cubic metre of water.
Time - 1 second was defined by the Babylonians and it doesn't seem like we've come up with anything better yet, except for the 24-hour clock, Newton's redefinition to make hours consistent in length throughout the year and whatnot.
Temperature - Celsius/Kelvin are defined again by water - dividing the temperature scale between freezing and boiling of water at normal atmospheric pressure by 100 is a reasonable starting point.
I'm not going to go into all the other ones - moles, Ampere, candela etc can stay on the sidelines for now.

Coming from this, there are also a few practical everyday ones that come into play. The one I'm usually faced with is fuel consumption, which is measured as litres / 100 km in metric, and miles per gallon in the imperial system. Note that these two are each others' inverse - the metric one is fuel consumption per distance, while the imperial one is distance achieved per volume of fuel. I would argue that the latter is a lot more practical. As your engine/driving becomes more efficient, further gains result in increasingly minuscule decreases in fuel efficiency in metric, while in imperial, the mpg figure keeps increasing more consistently.

SO IF I WAS IN CHARGE ...

We'd probably stick with a few practical considerations. Keep the second, it's going to mess with everything if you change it [3]. Stick with the Earth and water as the yardsticks.

The litre is a practical size, neither too big nor too small. However, use that to derive the length scale, so your new Metre becomes 1/10 of the old one, or 1/100 000 000 of the meridian distance, or the distance light travels in 1/29979245.8 of a second. Your height is now around 17 metres - you're welcome.

Next, the kilogram. Or, as I'd call it, the Gram. Again, it's a convenient size so just renaming it works. Household scales would be labelled in grams and milligrams. If you keep the metric tonne, just redefine it as a thousand grams ... aka one kilogram :)

And yeah, measure your fuel consumption in (new)kilometres per litre - it's about 4x the mpg factor so it stays a reasonable number.

[1] I've decided that anything I have worth sharing deserves a longer format than Bluesky will allow, so I guess I'm returning to my oldest form of social media.
[2] These are the original definitions. Modern physics have exact definitions based on fundamental constants of nature, but that's not why they were set the way they were.
[3] Changing the length of the second is no joke. It's part of pretty much every base unit definition except the mole.

Entry tags:

Fingers crossed

This was a very stressful couple of weeks at work - not in a bad way, in a 'big important deadlines ahhh' kind of way - but I might be getting my first independent research project if my proposal is selected for funding!

Will be taking a couple of days off this week after all that; Z also has a minor surgery on Friday, so I'd like to be free in case needs anything.

The free time that I haven't been spending on the submission has mostly been spent on writing the latest chapter of my Morrowind WIP. I was nervous about posting it, because it's a very important chapter that the story has been building up to for a while, plus I ended the last chapter on a cliffhanger and took a week off, and then I would have wanted the time to do one more pass over it... but based on the heartbroken comments, it had the impact I was hoping it would, so that was a relief.

Artistic gymnastics Worlds were this past week, and although I really enjoyed rhythmic Worlds (I watched with my parents - my dad enjoyed it a lot more than he expected to), and I made time to watch some of the figure skating GPs so far, between work and my recent meh feelings on artistic, I didn't end up watching more than a couple of videos. After the Paris fuck-up, the fan reactions to the Paris fuck-up (hoo boy did some fans who think of themselves as progressive let their racism fly), the recent Simone transphobia fuckery (glad to know our human rights mean just as much as Covid masking did to her when the sponsors call! really nice that she found the time to apologize someone who used her own sexual assault as a gotcha but not someone she ran off social media for not liking her floor music!), and who got through the "neutral" athlete screening from Russia... I wasn't feeling like trying to fit it in. Can't even be that happy that Leanne first proved wrong everyone proclaiming US gymnastics done, over with, won't win a single medal, because I don't like her, lol. (She's almost certainly an anti-vaxxer despite being pre-med, and I find her constant resume-fluffing endeavors annoying.) Nice results for Josc and Kaylia and Aiko, I guess.

On a happier note, now that I have free time again this weekend, I've been catching up on my reading. I just finished Renault's Fire From Heaven, her first Alexander the Great book. I'm not entirely sure exactly how I feel about it yet or whether I want to try another one of her novels; it was a very up-and-down book for me, with some parts that captured my attention for a long time, and others that felt like a slog.

One thing I did enjoy is that you can tell Renault put a lot of love into the setting, though I did learn quite fast that I shouldn't be looking up every unfamiliar name and place, because there were simply too many, and let them flow over me for the most part. The way she wrote it feels very immersive, with the characters just living their lives in a very different world than the one I live in. And while I'm sure she's over-romanticizing the historical Alexander, he made for an interesting central character, and there were still undertones in things like his relationship with Hephaestion that made him not feel 100% like a hero.

There was also a lot more stated indirectly or by implication than in other books I've read recently, which was a nice change of pace, though it did occasionally get confusing when I was tired or felt like I was missing some historical context. I also had a bit of trouble with the number of characters and how spaced out their appearances sometimes were - for instance, the backstory of Pausanias, who is central to the climax, is told briefly maybe a third of the way through, and then he doesn't appear again for another third of the novel, at which point I had completely forgotten who he was. However, the fact that I read some of the book slowly and had to give it back to the library for a few weeks definitely didn't help there.

I think one of the things that made some parts more difficult for me to get through is that her use of grammar is often pretty loose, more so in some scenes than others. While this can be used for good effect, I'm pretty sure some of her excess commas were mistakes, and there was at least one sentence that looked like it got mangled by OCRing the original into an ebook and didn't get fixed. She uses a lot of comma splices, sometimes chains together multiple phrases with semicolons, and does whatever this thing is with using a semicolon to add a dependent clause, which I associate with older works:
Those in his path would dress ranks anxiously, or fidget with their equipment; then stand easier, aware that he had not looked at them.
Again, sometimes these added nicely to the feel and rhythm of the scenes, but when there's too many comma splices and 'a; b; c; d; e.' sentences together, I found it tiring to read. It did remind me to watch out for overusing those kinds of sentence structures in my own writing where they feel like they fit the tone of the story.