Category: Reading

The “Ten Cannots”.

I met William J H Boetcker today, by way of my daily Gisnep Puzzle.
Best known for the “Ten Cannots” apparently. As I read them, I saw several that fly in the face of present day public domain discourse.

Example … “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.”

Aren’t we all wishing the rich would pay more tax, and if they continue to stay recalcitrant on that score, I’ve read that we should just take some of their billions. And, how much good we’d be able to do with XYZ donate just one of his several billions. And, how much can one person spend in a lifetime?

“And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

“You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.

“You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

“You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.

“You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

“You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.

“You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.

Mind you, I do like his seven crimes …

  • I don’t think.
  • I don’t know.
  • I don’t care.
  • I am too busy.
  • I leave well enough alone.
  • I have no time to read and find out.
  • I am not interested.

These are the curse of the times and I’ve been guilty myself of a few. I’ve been too busy. I have left well enough alone when I had no more energy to argue an alternative. I have had no time to read and find out when it’s been a thing that didn’t affect me.

But I would like once or twice in my life to be able to say “I am not interested.” I am, what sometimes feels, as though I am cursed with the curiosity of the proverbial cat. I can usually generate enough interest to explore any arcane, cryptic and/or mind-bending field of study. I used to call it all grist for my writing mill and may it grind finely, but since time is narrowing, I have started to limit my explorations.

Any of these “can-nots” that grab you? [Lol, I put the hyphen in because I kept reading “carrots”!]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._H._Boetcker

Lodestar’s Anuboids = ‘Centaurs’?

I literally just posted Lodestar 57 and tripped over this … There’s now a word for Anuboids, also known as ‘nubies’ in Lodestar, a novel I began roundabout 15 years ago. They might even be ‘reverse-centaurs’.

I’m gob-smacked, though I shouldn’t be. I’ve been overtaken by both science and the public domain. Now by Cory Doctorow, which is a kind of thrill.

“A centaur is someone whose work is supercharged by automation: you are a human head atop the tireless body of a machine that lets you get more done than you could ever do on your own.” from https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/



Reading: “The 2084 Report” by James Lawrence Powell

A gripping read, I think partly due to the verifiable facts often quoted with present day or historical dates attached to them.

Although promoted as fiction, it’s worrying when you’re reading about increasing bushfires in Australia, for example, the fires in 2019 (!) are part of the story.

And that’s only one incident among hundreds. most events that happen in this account have their verifiable roots in the last decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st century.

And by 2020, Powell posits, it all already was too late. Even if by some God-decreed disaster, CO2 emmissions had stopped right then … four years ago … it was too late to stop or even ameliorate what he calls the baked-in effects of global warming.

This book is powerful enough that I will change my political affiliation and vote for the party that promotes nuclear power.

The final and short chapters in the book “Look to Sweden” twice. Sweden turned to nuclear power starting in the 1970s and was able to ride out the cascading avalanche of effects because of having enough power … presumably to power aircon and grow enough food indoors to keep their population from starving.

By the late 2010s, 10% of the world’s electricity was produced by 449 power generating reactors in 31 countries. the final chapter describes why nuclear failed in the story.

More than two dozen countries, including the US, China, Russia and India had says the author and have say I, the necessary experience and controls to build enough nuclear power generating reactors between 2030 and 2050 to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade or 3.6 degrees F.

Yep. I know it’s supposed to be fiction but I call it a thin veneer of fiction tieing together the masses and masses of facts into a palatable account of what’s facing us.

I doubt I have another ten years, but there are all you and you, my kids, and grand kids. Go read this book. Hate what happens to your country. Do something about it.

Rabbit Hole 1

Fell through a rabbit hole and discovered what ‘product managers’ actually do. First had to google what they are … had heard the title bandied about by various acquaintances.

This definition from the Atlassian website: “A product manager is the person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.”

So is this a fancy name for a sales person? Maybe, maybe not. The rabbit hole took a turn.

‘Selling’ is apparently a slippery concept. Some of the people answering the question in Quora.com say product managers don’t do selling, that there are sales managers for that. Other people say product managers sell all the time, such as selling their ideas to their team (internal) and selling the product externally.

What I’m taking away from it is that product management is a process that marketers go through to identify prospective customers and set them up with the products that that marketer provides.

One example I came across is a company requiring a fleet of EVs. They applied to a product management company to help them get a deal.

Another example is the way I bought my unit in a retirement village. Although it was case of me reaching out to them through their website, in hindsight I recognize the procedures involved in getting me to the signing-up event. Interesting article I just read about it all https://assaph.substack.com/p/user-journeys-the-real-heros-journey

Books On Books Collection – Karen Green

Here/Gone (2008) Here/Gone: An ABC Flip Book for Grown Ups (2008) Karen Green Perfect bound, invertible flipbook. 215 x 215 mm. pages. Acquired from…

Books On Books Collection – Karen Green

While I am always on the lookout for art books to interact with, every so often I see/read/hear about a book process or published article with so much promise as well as being very special in itself, I instantly would like to ‘own’ it.

To hold it in my hands. To leaf through it. Turn and turn it about, reading the story from go to woe … which in this story is the reality. To love it, in effect.

Yet this share to my blog will have to do me this time!

What’s a thing you would like to ‘own’ but cannot?

Reading: ‘Doomsday Book’

Published in 1992

This is one of those novels that improves on a second reading. Probably I tried to race through it too fast first time I read it. And with a many stranded novel such as this, that will not work.

Although it’s a story of time travelling, and does the nitty gritty of the character in the 1300s very well, it’s also an extremely detailed story of the latter half of the twentieth century masquerading as the 2050s.

While I never confused the two eras, the detail of life in the so-called 2050s and the number of interesting lives that were being described, made it hard to sustain interest in the historian stuck in the 1320s. Especially since it became clear early in the piece that her rescue would have to originate in the future where she came from.

I found it increasingly difficult to have patience enough to go back into the 1320s and I suspect that the story set in the 1320s was always smaller. The mystery of Kithrin’s illness too had to be solved in the future.

The set-up took a long time, many pages of often not-understandable detail before we meet Kithrin in 1320. Which is normal in SF, of course. There is always a lot of material needed to be held ‘in abeyance’, as it used to be called, where a reader needs to remember a bunch of new facts before they are explained.

In this story, there were frequent reminders rather than an explanation as early as possible.

There was so much of such detail that it gave the impression of foam on the real beer underneath, or seafoam on a beach where you have to wade through to find the strand’s features.

Kithrin’s problems with the language in the medieval time where she was transposed went on for longer than I had patience for, yet this is not a novel where you can skip bits. The old words begged to be translated but the effort took me out of the story too often.

I began to look forward to Colin’s story for its comic relief, with hardly with any relevance to the main two stories.

The style tells me the time the events are taking place are maybe the 1950s to 1980s. It was published in 1992. And so the story’s present day reads like history in this present day, not the 2050s not too far into our future.

This novel will reward a patient reader prepared to chew through it steadily. Almost every actor in it, even walk on parts, get characterisation, their fifteen minutes on the stage. There were parts I enjoyed and parts that irritated me.