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Another weekend come and gone. Little enough done, I’ve got a poetry reading Tuesday night and nothing ready except a couple of very short pieces, not enough at all.
Last minute cramming has been a lifelong habit of mine, stretching back at least to Junior High and, I’m pretty sure, even elementary school. So, it’ll be all right.

A lot of people on my Facebook feed, probably more than half, are Americans, and a lot of them are passing the day today bitching about daylight savings time. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with them. It seems to me very arbitrary and silly, and if people want to have more daylight in the day, they should change their work hours, or maybe the schools could change their schedule, but doing it across the board is kind of unnecessary.
But, I’d put a pretty low priority on it. After all, any way we choose to measure time, it is arbitrary and man made, yet bound up in tradition and hard to change. Sort of like money.
As far as the horse race question, that is, not whether it should or should not change but just speculating as to whether it ever will, my guess it it’s not going to change any time soon. It’s a bit like the electoral college. Once every four years, lots of people complain about it (generally, everybody who was on the losing side), but then everybody forgets and goes on their way and it does not get changed.
It’s not that big a deal, really. It gives a bit more power to smaller states, which is maybe not such a bad idea, since they are the ones who grow all the food, and have all the National Parks, and they are the places everyone is going to flee to in any apocalyptic situation.
In any event, any politician running for national office knows how it works and can plan their campaign accordingly.
It does not inherently favor conservatives over liberals, old vs. young, or even rich vs. poor.
Summary: I think we could live without it, but it’s not going to change.

Not a very productive day at all, today. My plan was to get a poem written, but there was one tickling my mind, I knew I’d written down the idea for it, like the last two lines, weeks ago, but I went through all my papers looking and I did find that two line inspiration but still don’t know what I’ll do with it.
I guess my approach to writing poetry would seem un-poetic to most, like I should be forced to turn in my poet’s card, but I can justify it, I think. Whereas most people write what they are inspired to write, I’ve reached the point where I just start churning out words and hoping an idea will follow, which is sort of what I’m doing right now. With poetry, this means that I am now working it on an industrial level, with this blog, writing lots of snarky little 2 or 4 liners just in response to a Facebook thread (I don’t know if those are any good, they generally get ignored completely, if they don’t cauterize the thread immediately), and more than 1 poetry reading a month, but industrial level is fine by me, you come up with 1 line and then just juggle words until the right ones fall into place.
There’s usually almost an infinite number of balls.
Write a lot. Then you can afford to throw out the crap. Write a lot. You never can tell what other people will like. Write a lot. Give your ideas every chance to grow. Write a lot, and at least you’ll have a lot written.
I’m not saying that’s what I do do. It’s just what a writer should do so this is just written as much as advice to myself as anything.

So, while everybody was focused on his Twitter feed, President Donald J. Trump sent troops to Syria. Or maybe it’s a part of his ‘let the military do whatever they damn well please’ policy, you can’t be sure.
Nonetheless, a couple hundred troops have landed in Syria. I don’t think I’m even going out on a limb when I say that this will end badly.
They could achieve their objective, and then what? They haven’t been invited in by the Syrian government, or any group with enough influence to be taken seriously.
Their objective is ostensibly to retake an ISIS stronghold. But Assad is already at work on that. With Russian help. So, if we’re taking the same position as Assad, and Russia, why not just back off and let them deal with it?
What if, on their way to retaking this ISIS position, which might not be such a piece of cake, they wind up in a firefight with Syrian troops, or, worse, Russia.
What if this turns into a Viet Nam type situation? Mission creep was a thing in the 60s, now it’s the President.
There is one more reason I believe this will be a tragedy, it’s a disaster in the making, and it’s an even more important factor than the U.S. having a jackass for a leader. The reason that I think it will go wrong is: it always does

I saw the article and it looked interesting, cool photos of Titan, and this was presented as a new thing, and they were very cool pictures of Titan, which, being a moon of Saturn, is seriously far away. But then I noticed that it was from 2005.
In some ways we are making great scientific advances. Solar energy and wind energy are just about to the point where they can satisfy all of our energy needs, Finland has plans to switch to all electric cars in the next few years, we have 3-D printers that can build whole houses, computers are getting very close to artificial intelligence, and robots can do gymnastics and dance. (google Boston Dynamics – they’ve got video that will knock your socks off.)
But a space shot from 2005 is still a big deal.
I don’t know why we’re not doing more in space. We’re doing plenty with telescopes, and the space station is still chugging along, but it looks like the first colonies on Mars might be private. Because the governments of Earth are all short-sighted, corrupt, unimaginative, and cowardly.

If the CIA has the wherewithal (and they’re not denying they do) to hack anybody and make it look like the Russians did it, there is no reason to assume the Russians don’t have the technology to hack the DNC and make it look like the CIA did it, because their scientists are as good as our scientists, it’s just a question of who is prioritizing what.
Personally, I suspect the CIA, but that’s because I always suspect the CIA. We have absolutely no way of knowing, and at least in the case of the DNC emails, it doesn’t matter. I’m glad they were exposed.
It’s sort of like with photoshop. I’m no expert, I can’t tell if something is photoshopped or not, and I look through the thread and some people are saying ‘that’s obviously photoshopped’ and some people are saying ‘no, that’s a genuine photo’ and unless I know them personally I have no way of knowing whether they know what they are talking about. So many people on Facebook exaggerate their level of expertise, which is not surprising, because most people exaggerate their level of expertise in real life as well.
Nobody ever wants to admit that they don’t know what they are talking about, which is kind of silly because nobody knows what they are talking about except a very few people, and even them only within a very narrow field of interest.
This morning I was teaching at a chemistry lab a bit outside of Prague, 3 scientists, 1 hour each. Sometimes I ask them questions about their work, but I don’t usually understand the answers so we wind up talking about more mundane things. Today, during a changeover of students, I picked up a book on the shelf, a reference book on chemistry, and leafed through it for a couple of minutes. The words were all in English but I had no idea what they were talking about, and there was about 900 pages of that, small font text plus diagrams. And that’s just one field. I’m sure there are books which go into just as much detail on medicine, astronomy, geology, wildlife, botany, economics and witchcraft.
It’s a sea of information, and nobody can do more than dabble their toes from a nice, safe beach somewhere.
I don’t really have a solution. It’s a scary world and it’s good to remain skeptical, but we only have civilization in the first place because at some point, tens of thousands of years ago, we were willing to allow for specialization, and development of individual talents in varying directions.
Skepticism. Trust. They don’t go together, at all, and yet we need both. Weird, eh?