By ninth grade I'd made it to the classes where they don't bother teaching you grammar anymore because it's just pedantic and only serves to allow snarky teenagers to call into question why you're diagramming sentences while also being forced to write essays about ee cummings and Tom Wolfe. My friends, however, were not so lucky and were still busily spending 90% of their class time picking through multiple-choice lists of adverbs. I commented that grammar in general was a waste of time as English dominated trade and governance in no small part because it is largely a loan language whose strength is the incorporation of new vocabulary and sentence structure and that the reason Castilian Spanish, Mexican Spanish and Northern New Mexican Spanish were borderline incompatible was that only Castilian Spanish has a language academy forever holding Spanish, a fundamentally easier and less stupid language, from evolving into something everyone would speak by choice. I believe I compared the study of grammar to reanimating a corpse. Mind you, I was sixteen. Apparently this argument so convinced my friends that they decided to take it to their teacher. They did not present it well. They argued, as I understand it, that the study of grammar causes language innovation to "decompose" and thus, if the teacher really wanted them to learn English, they should be allowed to use whatever grammar they wanted. In response, the teacher referred to grammar as "decomposing" for the next two years in my honor. I have a great deal more geopolitical insight now than I did then. Nonetheless, I maintain that the lower registers of English are as ad-hoc as they are because codifying rules for conversational English is like building a fence on a mudslide, and it is this lack of footing that makes English more inviting to non-native speakers than it would be with a rigid structure. "scare quotes" are effectively "emphasis" for large swaths of the population. You Can Communicate Timing... in many ways. I can type thru instead of through and my spellchecker gives no fucks. "It be" is now acceptable vernacular for "it is". Note that this does not apply to higher registers of English, which are still abusively codified. But then, that's the purpose of Jargon - it preserves elitism and expertise. As for me? My linguistic skill comes purely from parroting. I can read "hyphenate and adverb with an adjective" and have no idea what that even means out of context. Subconsciously I know that "half-full glass" is improper grammar even though we all know exactly what it means; consciously I know that "half-full glass" is perfectly acceptable in my daily speech but if I were speaking formally or to people I'm not familiar with I would say "half-filled glass" but that's entirely about social signalling and not at all about accuracy.
I'm not arguing for proper grammar or nit-picking rules, especially in our informal setting, but as someone who has to pass exams on those higher registers, I have no option but to know those rules. veen is/was in the same boat, hence the comment. Examinations aside, from my experience with foreign languages, it's heaps more important to know vocab than grammar beyond simple tenses/conditionals, but even then, communication will be predicated on other's willingness to go along.
I'm not saying you are. I'm saying that any official case against grammar beyond the most egregious is made without standing. I literally had to google "list of adverbs" because my brain does not think taxonomically when it comes to words. "Speedily-painted" "roughly-hewn" "viciously-sharp" are all perfectly acceptable English constructions. Not that it matters. I seriously doubt grammar has been accounted for in Dall-E in the way we're discussing - it's just got a gazillion Markov runs through a huge dataset.
It's now been three months post-'rona infection and my health is still garbage from time to time. Went for a bit of a walk on Saturday after an exhaustive Friday, and as a result it's taken me the entire Sunday and Monday to recover. It felt like I had ran a marathon instead of a half hour stroll around the park. It's genuinely demotivating, as I haven't done any form of exercise in the past months and it seems that my intuition that I can't handle more than a ~20 minute bike ride per day was right. There may very well be a compounding factor at play here (stress, weight loss) but I can't shake the feeling that I have not felt healthy this entire year to date.
Everyone's health is garbage right now. Every other pediatrics call to the clinic: "My kid is sick all the time and it's not corona!" "that's because it's every illness all at once attacking your kid's immune system because we're all stressed out and dealing with corona!" It is genuinely demotivating. My yoga instructor flat-out said "you need to acknowledge that 'running' is a part of your life that's over." Nonetheless I ran three times last week. You have to be patient with yourself and acknowledge that any movement is better than no movement, and that if you get out of the house to so much as loop around the block, that's one loop around the block you wouldn't have made otherwise. You have to recognize that your body is dealing with special circumstances and that you need to grade on a curve. You're going to be tempted to judge yourself against yourself at your best. What you need to do is judge yourself against yourself last week, and acknowledge that there will be steps backward due to forces entirely beyond your control.
Thanks, I needed to hear that. I do feel torn between "listen to your body and take it easy / move less" and "keep on moving slowly and steadily", as I don't know what will work best in my recovery. You seem to be suggesting the latter, right? Because my inclination is to do the former.
I'm suggesting both. Do what you can, when you think you can do it, and celebrate that you did it rather than condemning that you didn't do enough. I'm not going to run three times this week. Maybe twice, maybe once. But I'm walking every damn day, often twice a day. Is it enough? not by a long shot. Is it what I got? It's what I can repeat, that improves my health, that's sustainable. Learned something dealing with my mom's bullshit. Medicare uses the acronym "RTB" for "Return To Baseline" to determine when they're kicking you out of physical therapy. For most of us? "Baseline" would be "all better." For Medicare? It means "you're within 20% of the asymptote it looks like you're going to hit." Medicare literally cuts you off from physical therapy as soon as you start to level off. You'd think that'd be a money decision but nah - the way the laws are written Medicare gets to claw back all the money they spent on you within five years of your death, and your heirs can't dispute any prices - now you know why medicine in the US is so expensive, considering 95% of your medical care is in the last six months of your life. There's recovery? And then there's slllllowwwwwwwwwwww recovery. With old people there's "RTB." I'm having to acknowledge that for purposes of Long Covid, I'm "old people" and every minor victory is a major one and it sucks. You? I'll bet you do better. But you gotta give yourself the permission to do it at a sustainable rate.
I have been trying to understand. 60% of my team has kids in 2-4 year old range, and they are constantly sick. Like, much more so than in normal years? The added part to this is that their parents (the people on my team) are now also nearly constantly sick because they keep catching whatever their kids get. It's a giant mess.Everyone's health is garbage right now. Every other pediatrics call to the clinic: "My kid is sick all the time and it's not corona!" "that's because it's every illness all at once attacking your kid's immune system because we're all stressed out and dealing with corona!"
Constantly sick. Combine that with the fact that schools now require you to take three days off if you so much as confess to a cough, that school schedules now have to be written around a dire shortage of staff and teachers and an entire cohort that learned (for two years!) that the Minimum Viable Product for "school" is "watch your teacher on a screen somewhere yammer about stuff that you won't be tested on". It's a shitshow. We'll be feeling the effects for a generation.
If you haven’t already (I’ve suggested this a bit recently, so please forgive me if I brought this up earlier): fill your lungs as much as possible with air, then hold for at least 30s. Repeat 3x daily. It won’t help with fatigue, but dramatically affects ability to regain your breath. Also, saw you’re a proponent of PostGIS in the last pubski. Are you planning on heading to FOSS4G this year? Or have you been to one as of yet? Would love to catch the next one inthe West Hemisphere, and have a few questions if you’ve been.
I haven’t! The only international GIS conference I’ve been to was the Esri UC, once, only because it was on their dime. Did go to a the Dutch equivalent a few weeks ago. I’m curious what the wider GIS community thinks of Felt, which just launched the other day.
How did you enjoy the UC - have any takeaways from it? I only attended the virtual 2021 UC. The workshops I've seen come out of it are invaluable... well, they are probably tangibly valuable to ESRI given they are word-of-mouth ads... other than those, they seem well-made and exciting on the whole. I'm a single part of GIS community, but I was described as wider at my latest doctor visit - so that's gotta count for something. On a surface level, it's a great entry point for GIS. Maybe even a good learning tool for younger audiences or laymen. The customizability is lacking, which can lead more interested users down a loooooooong rabbit hole (that in turn would lead more invested users to ESRI - or worse, opensource). To the creator's point, that's kind of the appeal behind Felt tho, no? Simplicity. Willing to bet there's a fair amount of opensource tech running on the back end. Exciting to see where it goes. Might be a nice tool to send to my brother for easy learning of the basics. My brother and I have had an on-going discussion for the past few years on how cool he believes the GIS work can be based on what I've worked on, plus where there's an theoretically small leap from his skillset (SQL/Datamining) to mine (Cartography). Up until recently, my limited purview - not connecting the dots between PostGIS and our discussions - had me saying: "Take a GIS certificate course I guess?" Which would, what, qualify his "GIS" skills for an imagery analyst at best? With a laaaaaaaaaaaaaarge gap between "I know what vector and raster data are (smiley face)" and "I know how to tinker on the dev-end of a WCS," the question has been whether it’s worth it for an early-30s professional with a masters degree to go back to rudimentary technical schooling for the bare-bones basics of anther profession entirely. Enter: PostGIS. Taking the time off from work to dive deeper into SQL since the progression of learning seems to be “GIS -> PostgreSQL -> PostGIS.” And those are probably medium-level learning curves at best. My hope is I can use this time to learn via Coursera/Udemy, then apply the learnings to some form of passion projects. Either sustainable energy or reviving some of my grad-school projects but taking a different approach. Don’t know how long this will take, but ideally it will be something to showcase to the next employer(s) long term. Visual warning if you’re on a browser: see second graph. This has been on my mind since reading it (grain of salt given for Medium article). Would venture that me applying my GIS knowledge to spatial SQL vs. my brother applying his SQL knowledge to spatial SQL would net him higher pay/title/etc… curious to see how it will turn out.
As a whole the GIS world is...surprisingly shallow. There are some technical niches for sure, but compared to what I've seen in other domains of engineering, one can get incredibly fast to a point where one can do 80% of all GIS work. Really, a basic GIS course combined with a modicum of data-wrangling chops and Google skills can get you very far. To speak from personal experience; I had 2 mandatory GIS courses at uni, took one Python+GIS elective, and learned enough on the job the past 4 years (all of ArcGIS Online + PostGIS + ArcPy) that I can prolly apply for most senior GIS jobs out there. A lot of GIS work is just about getting the right input into the right GIS tool(s) and ✨presenting✨the result. I know people who have done nothing more than "load data into GIS, apply pre-made tools, visualize" for decades. Which for sure is reflected to a degree in salary. A shockingly small niche (over here at least) is the people who are good at writing queries and half-decent at GIS. PostGIS legitimately can replace 95% of the individual pre-made tools QGIS and ArcGIS has to offer. You can do much more complex things much faster. My largest project the past year ended up being 2300 lines of PostGIS/SQL code I wrote on my own. The first 30% is just data prep written in code - "make sure I properly join tables A thru G in the data type I want it to be without ever having to touch Field Mappings ever again". The rest is a bunch of clever geo-joins and a bunch of not clever regular joins of tables and features. Nothing special to anyone who already knows how to handle semi-long SQL queries; PostGIS is really just one new column type and a bunch of functions to do stuff with it. For many in the GIS world, once they start seeing the benefit of PostGIS, they often don't go back. It really is objectively better to get shit done. Which means that a lot of skilled GIS people have made a lot of PostGIS code that only a small subset of GIS people can work with. Which means that if you're the kind of person whose brain can be wrapped around the core concepts of SQL and GIS, it's an easy ticket into advanced GIS work. For me it took a 2-day (intense) course plus a week of actually working with it under a deadline to go from "I can do most anything I want with Arc" to "no wait actually this PostGIS thing rawks". YMMV - I know in the US, the GIS world is much more imagery heavy, and imagery does not gell well with PG. But I can get so* much more work done these days by doing 95% of it in PG from the QGIS Database Manager that it's an easy recommendation.
Hang in there, pal. I started upping my workout routine (which is to say I started working out) because I felt so unhealthy partly due to cover and partly due to being unhealthy. I'm trying to fortify myself. Mostly weight training and some intense cardio. I feel better, no doubt about it. Maybe try some weight training?
I've been off nicotine now for 65 hours. My brain functioning sort of returned to normal after 48 hours, which was a big relief since the first two days were an unproductive haze. I'm not sure if I missed the bus to work on Monday because it never showed up, or because my brain had shut down and I was just standing there staring into space.
The first week is rough. You can do it! The other side of nicotine addiction is a great place. No more being smelly, having to be beholden to cravings, wasting money etc. You've got this!
Monday Tuesday Wednesday I'm fucking good at this shit. Nobody cares. I became an engineer because my father is an engineer and when I call he hangs up the phone. He was calling me a criminal for owning cryptocurrency while driving a snitch with five felony convictions to the asshole's methadone appointments, even though he was literally stealing the copper out of the shop wiring. Solidworks does this shit where it does something dumb, and you google it, and it takes you to Reddit, which is full of assholes going "you obviously don't know what you're doing, Solidworks is pure and beautiful." Some dipshit posted his fucking bicycle, which he modeled in Solidworks, which was like his grad project or some shit, 128 parts. 896 parts and it's just the fucking stand and electricals Know who taught me Solidworks? A month with a correspondence course. Know who taught me electrical engineering? No one. Know what kept this shit from working? Amazon selling resistors that are airgaps. All my life I've wanted one fucking atta-boy and here I am, pushing 50, recognizing that I was never going to get one. This is also like the eighth time in my life where I've been out past the point where you can even find someone to ask and I'm starting to get sick of it. Go ahead. Ask when it's going to be done. 'cuz you know what? There's eight spreadsheets worth of electrical connections but I know where each and every one of them goes. I figured that shit out last week. you might be an engineer if your wiremold comes with parabolic arches
It's a tragedy that your parents haven't ever and apparently cannot give you any credit for developing, with little help, into the person you are. I know this is of probably immeasurably small consolation, but I'm a really fucking smart and creative scientist, and I stand in slack-jawed awe of some of the the shit you come up with. Fuck your parents if they can't recognize that.
I appreciate that. Things have been more difficult of late because my in-laws' lives have pushed things in an unpleasant direction. My mother-in-law definitely has some trauma in her past and her method for dealing with stuff is to repress it and pretend it didn't happen. My father-in-law has learned that you go along to get along. So when my mother-in-law decided to tear into me for working on a motorcycle because it's a waste of time? I knew that wasn't about me. And when she refused to stop even after I told her she was being offensive? I knew that was her inability to do anything other than repress it. And when my father-in-law told my wife at breakfast it was because she's never really liked me and has an axe to grind? I knew that was him refusing to acknowledge that her coping strategies are failing, she's becoming increasingly isolated and that she's lashing out in the darkness. And when I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to say "are you okay? I know this isn't about me, what's it about? Can we please try and work through this" only to get "you're not getting anything more than 'I'm sorry you feel bad' have some pretzels" I knew that was her inability to cope more than anything else. But it doesn't change the fact that I invited my in-laws over to dinner, got excoriated for doing something neither of them understand, was told it's because they've never liked me anyway and that I should move on... ...because they needed to have ice cream cake at my house two days later because it's my mother-in-law's birthday and then they're going to Ireland with the in-laws who don't disappoint them constantly. So now I got nobody. Because fuckin' hell, whatever I got going on in my life from this point forth I'm sure as shit not letting them in on.
I've used solidworks, Catia, and NX (UG) and assemblies always shit the bed at the first opportunity. The separation between assemblies that fall apart with hundreds or a thousand parts and assemblies that work with tens of thousands is usually a restrictive assembly design rulebook enforced by the cranky cad-db admin who wrote it threatening to delete all changes until everyone complies.
I switched from Fusion to Solidworks because while Fusion claims to do parametric design, Solidworks actually does. My problems with it are invariably due to hinky shit - more often than not, it's due to Solidworks' weird adamance about lineweights and printing. Lately I've discovered that incorporating parabolas into design allows you to inject math in places you'd really rather just have pretty arches. But yeah "how do I change my default font" is this whole thing that everyone basically says "uhh don't" about.
"Title blocks are broken again when we print" "Did you try File-Print or File-Plot? Because you need to quit that. Use the pixelated PLT icon on the custom toolbar that runs the plotting script from 2004 that is somehow easier to fix with each update than fixing all the other configs." If you find a way getting coordinates from the pretty arches, there's probably a decent way of importing points and turning them into curves or surfaces.
Turns out my manufacturing process isn't fault-tolerant enough for what I'm trying to do anyway This part has no arches? And it worked at half-size? but apparently the goo built up enough that the printer decided to just knock it the fuck over and then build a rat's nest on top. If your reach does not exceed your grasp you will never know how far you can stretch, right?
My gut says to break-up, my head says, "well maybe this can work", but I feel like all the intimacy is gone from my relationship. Just mega, super bummed, and not sure what to do. Have been buying replacement furniture & items for the house so I'm not living in a half-empty place until my lease is up.
About a dozen recruiters reached out with teaching jobs, and I'm on the fence. We're in a drought for teachers, to the point where many schools fill spots with part-timing students (as in '3rd/4th-year undergrads' desperate), so despite it being a generally shitty line of work for guys and my aim set a tad higher, I still want to help. On the other hand, I have no idea if I can handle it regardless of meds working like magic. It's not the kind of stress I think I ever got fully accustomed to, and my worst breakdowns were accompanied by horrible students. Otherwise, read up a lot on garden planning/maintaining, obliterated gazebo, done on chemistry and soon will be with physics.
I've got covid a second time. First time was very mild, then after the vaccine and 2 boosters this round is quite a bit worse. Might be a different strain, but probably got a higher exposure this time too. Not terrible, I've had worse flus, but pretty uncomfortable. Wednesday I had the thermostat at 81F and wore a thermal shirt so I didn't get chilled every time the AC kicked on. Now the fever is gone and I'm just coughing a lot. Family reunions are about playing elaborate card games while an aunt complains about how oppressive covid restrictions were (in Alabama), then returning home and 1 in 5 people is sick within 2 days. -------------------------- I think next year I'm going to roll the dice and plant the garden a month early. If there's a late freeze I'll just replant, but the early heat waves were the bigger problem the last couple years.
A storm smashed like ten percent of our system in an hour. Crazy. There are still outages 48 hours later with a chance at another storm this evening.