Local Newspaper Reporting

The Atlantic (January/February 2010): "There’s an old joke about the provincial newspaper that reports a nuclear attack on the nation’s largest city under the headline “Local Man Dies in NY Nuclear Holocaust.” Something similar happens at the national level, where everything is filtered through politics. (“In what was widely seen as a setback for Democrats just a year before the midterm elections, nuclear bombs yesterday obliterated seven states, five of which voted for President Obama in the last election …”)"

Forgive to Feel Better

Copied this article from the Daily Mail (UK). I love the parable but forgiving is impossible sometimes.

(Daily Mail UK March 13 2012):

This is an old Native-American parable.

 ‘I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart,’ a grandfather tells his grandson.

‘One wolf is vengeful, angry and violent. The other is loving and compassionate.’

‘Which wolf will win?’ the grandson asks.

‘The one I feed,’ the grand- father answers.

So it is with forgiveness. We’ve all been hurt, or wronged by enemies, or worse, by lovers. The way we react defines the health of our relationship. If we hold on to the hurt, it will turn to anger, resentment and even violence.

Letting it go has the power to change our lives for the better. Forgiveness is essentially selfish. To forgive even makes us healthier — less prone to anxiety and depression, with lower blood pressure. But how do you let go of those things that claw at your insides?

One answer is meditation. Find a quiet space and let your mind go and observe the thoughts. Notice that they are just thoughts, just temporary.

Now imagine them floating away. By feeding the compassion inside us we can move on to a happier, healthier place. Which is the place where love lives.

TO FORGIVE:

Value: Understand the power of forgiveness to change your life. Forgive for your own sake.

Reflect: Think objectively about what happened and why. Understanding is the first step in forgiving.
• Choose: Once you’re ready, choose to forgive. And keep choosing to do so. True forgiveness means forgiving until you’ve forgotten.

alphaheart.com

Kindle E-Reader and Other Stuff

I sit here with my morning coffee thinking about my Kindle e-book reader and (paper) books. It occurs to me I am living through another change caused by new technology. Being born in 1942, I have seen  several such changes. I have purchased several e-books on-line from Amazon and borrowed e-books on-line from my library. In the Internet age  distance means nothing but I still wonder at receiving books from an Indiana library while sitting here in Florida. Once selected from the on-line site the books usually appear on my Kindle in less than 60 seconds. Wow!

The e-books cannot be put on your shelf for future use...but they will exist in your e-book memory and the “cloud “ storage maintained for you by Amazon. My early model Kindle does not handle pictures and drawings well…but the e-print is expandable and easier to read than paper print. Graphics can be beautiful on PCs or an IPAD if you use them as your e-reader. E-readers with full color graphics are already here but the publishing industry is still working on a e-book business model that can survive.

Looking back to my youth I remember our home before TV. My parents used radio like we use TV today. The programming was the same type as today…drama, music, news, etc. but the pictures were in your imagination. When I was about eight (1950) we got our first black and white TV. I think color TV came to our house about 10 years later. Vacumn tubes powered our TVs. Stores had tube testers that you could use to find out which tube should be relaced. The transistor was a nerdy thing unknown to the public at the time that was to change the world.

The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley (seated at Brattain's laboratory bench), John Bardeen (left) and Walter Brattain (right). This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the 20th century

.

My first hands-on contact with computers was in the Navy. I was one of the first group  of Data System Tech ratings in the Navy. Our computer was a refrigerator sized box. It was made up of circuit boards with individual transistors in pencil eraser size cans with three legs (wires). The memory was a 32Kbit magnetic core type that was unreliable. We used front panel buttons laid out in binary and octal (based 8 number system) format to control the computer. My cheap digital wrist watch today has more power.

At IU (1960-61) a class I had covered FORTRAN, one of the early programming languages. We wrote some simple programs which were then put on punch cards. We took the cards over to the temple (the climate controlled computing center) where priests (operators) would feed out cards into the machine and the Gods (big main frame computers) would print out our fate (error! Invalid command!).

Fall registration at IU was a nightmare for some, especially Freshmen. Students gathered in the big gymnasium on 7^th street with class schedules in hand. No computers were used until after registration to sort the punch cards. Each department had tables set up and you lined up to wait your turn at the table. Then you find that the class (e.g. English 101 at 9:30 MWF)  is full so you have go back to other tables to change class times you already have in order to get the required classes at non-conflicting times. This led to un-workable situations for some kids as the classes filled up. The university figured on a 50% drop-out rate so they never had enough freshman classes. I saw kids sitting on the gym floor crying in frustration.

My first PC at work (1970) used the Microsoft DOS operating system. MS-DOS  is how Bill Gates began the road to become the wealthiest man in the world. This was command-line input…type in an instruction on the black and white monitor, hit return and see what happens. We also wrote programs in FORTRAN or BASIC to control test machines and analyze data.

Of course there has been progress in many fields since 1942 that have changed our lives in many ways. The engineers that figured out how to build a cell phone system went unnoticed by the public but the impact of it is now obvious to everyone. There was no new fundamental science breakthrough but existing technologies were put together in new way. So there is always stuff in the works below the public’s radar that may get our attention in a big way someday. Bill Gates talked about this and said advances do not happen overnight but on a scale of five or ten years big things can happen.