As someone who uses at least two wearables that gather all manner of biometric data about me, I have considerable concern about just how that data is used. I was pretty pleased with Oura’s old privacy policies; I’m not sure how much their most recent changes have compromised them. I’m not so sure about Google’s policies, but since Google knows everything else about me, I’m not inclined to worry a lot extra about the Fitbit data.
Anyway, this post by Bruce Schneier is interesting:
I have often said that surveillance tech is generally deployed first against people with diminished rights: children, prisoners, military personnel, the mentally impaired. This is another early use case with different dynamics. The surveilled are wealthy and powerful, and—in many cases—unionized.
I was out walking Ashley this morning when I saw this painting on top of the recycling bins near my house in Winfield Village.
I immediately thought of a guy (probably this guy) who would buy thrift-store landscape paintings and then add a monster to them.
I shared the image above with Steven, who immediately thought of the same guy. (Steven was the one who found that link, before I was even home from walking the dog.)
Isn’t that little lake just begging for a sea monster of some sort standing in it? Or maybe some little cryptids lurking in the trees?
Steven commented while he was visiting on how much fun vole-watching on my patio was.
Ashley thinks so too.
Ashley has caught three voles that I know of (because she was on-leash when she caught them). She may have caught some others on the patio when she was out there off-leash.
One thing that surprised me, because it is so different from our boxers when I was young, was how gentle her mouth is.
Our boxers would promptly dispatch whatever they caught—groundhogs, even raccoons. One shake of the boxer’s head and whatever it had captured in its powerful jaws was dead.
That is not Ashley’s modus operandi. Two of the voles that Ashley captured were released unharmed, after I told Ashley “drop it.” (The third got eaten before I got organized to tell Ashley not to.)
In addition to the three voles, Ashley has caught both one (rather stupid) squirrel, and one (rather immature) robin fledgling. Both of those were released unharmed as well.
I’m not quite sure why. I know some retrievers have very soft mouths, so they can bring back a dead fowl without ruining it. Maybe there’s a gene for that, and Ashley has it? Or maybe it’s just that she was rewarded repeatedly for being very gentle when she took treats from people’s hands?
Whatever it is, I like both aspects of my li’l pupper: truly a mighty hunter, but also a gentle one.
“One study he mentions analysed the skin of lifeguards at the start and end of a summer season during which they were heavily exposed to the sun. By summer’s end, their skin was enriched with microbial “beneficial bugs” that protect against UV radiation. A square centimetre of human skin contains millions of microorganisms, some of which produce compounds that kill cancer cells without harming normal ones.”
I mean, really. We know the UV rays are actinic, as are the blue-green rays (tell your brain it’s daytime), and the red and infrared rays (promote healing at various depths of skin and below the skin). I don’t know about all the other wavelengths, but I’m willing to bet that they all do something.
Humans evolved in the sun, and evolved different skin pigmentation that varied with latitude (and, I suspect, varied with other things as well). The idea that our skin can’t handle a perfectly ordinary amount of sunlight is just silly.
As you’ll know if you subscribe to my newsletter (sign up in the sidebar), my brother and I are attending SFWA’s Nebula Award Conference in Chicago.
Today Steven had SFWA board stuff all day, so after breakfast I went to the hotel fitness center for a workout.
Normally I always do a full warmup before a workout. (This is slightly problematic, as too often I just do the warmup, and then need to walk the dog and fix lunch, and end up never getting to the workout.) Today, because the scheduling seemed to work better, I did the workout first, right after breakfast. Then I did my morning exercises in the early afternoon.
That worked out surprisingly well.
One reason it worked out well was that I did most of the workout on new-to-me machines, so I started with reasonably low weights and worked my way up to working weights, which basically amounts to a warmup all by itself. I did:
Single-leg Romanian deadlifts with a 25 lb dumbbell 3 x 5 left/5 right (my only non-machine exercise)
I forgot to do goblet squats! There wasn’t a leg-press machine, and I kept thinking, “What can I do to work my glutes?” But I didn’t think of goblet squats. I can do those tomorrow, as well as hitting the other machines (leg curl, biceps curl, and chest press are the ones I didn’t do today).
In con-related news, I have successfully registered! I have a name badge, a program, and tickets for a promised book bag.
I’m expecting Steven’s board-related activities to wrap up shortly, and then we’re talking about heading out to a margarita bar. Or, if his thing runs too late, maybe just having a beer here in the hotel.
Have you ever seen a more pleasant garden spot than this sterile bit of lawn, concrete, and pavers at the Crowne Plaza O’Hare? There is no seating at all. There are some walls you can sit on, if you’re reasonably tall, but even the lowest bit of wall is too tall for me to balance a laptop on my knees.
I did find one cigarette butt, so I know the space does not go completely unused.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d made two changes to my morning routine: I had quit wearing my earbuds (and listening to podcasts) during my first two walks in the morning, and had started sitting down to write as soon as I got home from the second walk.
I am pleased to report that these changes are working great. I’ve done at least some fiction writing every single day for over three weeks now. Most of it was on a long-form project that I’m pressing ahead with, but I briefly paused to work on a short story (a flash piece?), that made use of one idea from my long-form project that I really liked, but that wasn’t working in the story.
“People with substantial cryptocurrency holdings face grave personal danger, and the physical attacks on their person grow bolder, more violent, and more sadistic by the day.”
Apropos nothing in particular, I just wanted to mention that I own no cryptocurrency assets at all, and (except for a few bitcoin cents that I briefly owned and then lost in 2011 in the hack of mybitcoin.com) I never have.
And, just for the record, I’ll also mention that I don’t think any cryptocurrency asset will ever be a thing of durable value. (This doesn’t mean that blockchains aren’t a useful technology. Just that they make crappy assets.)
However wonderful it is to find a great post, it’s much better to find a great writer. Back in the day when more people used RSS feed readers, it was perfectly ordinary to find a great post, and then click on the writer so you could add their feed to your feed reader.
I’d like to see the return of those days. Use an RSS feed reader again, and when you find a great post, you too can check out what else the writer writes, and if you like their other stuff too, go ahead and follow them.
