Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Karate

    The saying goes, before enlightenment you fetch water and chop wood, after enlightenment, you fetch water and chop wood. I'd say, before enlightenment, you enjoy the food at the restaurant, after enlightenment, you taste all the ingredient, separated from each other, without being cooked. It really feels like being unplug from the Matrix and then being plugged back. Kind of have to fake it for a while, hoping the illusion will kick in.

  • Should homelessness be allowed to exist

    I spent this morning flipping through videos in a doomscroll. One of the last ones involved some people talking about socialism and capitalism, free markets, and all the normal stuff that comes with it. There weren't any surprises in the talk, but I did come away with a question. The way the discussion was going touched on normal talking points for a given political spectrum usually without spending time to question things any deeper.

  • Book Swaps and Book Crossing

    Over the last few weeks, largely in an attempt to inject some whimsy in my life, I've managed to visit 3 free book swap locations (4 if you count Tesco).

    One of the many joys of living in a fairly rural county is such things are possibly and all blessing go out to those people who maintain them. Two were converted former phone boxes (the classic British red phone box) and the other is a shack on the edge of someone's garden.

    The shack is the closest and would be fairly easy to visit again. I happily browsed and came back with two books after dropping two off. As expected, largely a collection of popular fiction but all in surprising good condition. I think from FB, the lady running it is aiming at a community/charity focus with a plant swap, pot swap as well and encouraging people to drop off books for free then others to pay a tiny amount of money for up to 5 books each 'go'. An interesting endeavour and I'll be back to swap books but I'm cautious of donating unless I know more about how its being spent.

• Science

  • Hidden Figures (2016)

    Here's a film about spaceships, FORTRAN, and computers. I'm very glad I saw it before reading the Historical Accuracy section on its Wikipedia article, which has a somewhat defanging effect. It was a good watch at the time, but unfortunately the medium forced decades of diffuse, chronic, real historical issues into two hours of acute issues that go beyond dramatised, to fictionalised. It's far more deliverable and impactful that way, but undermines its potential.

    I am never a fan of the portrayal of mathematics in film. It's always a victim of the need to compress the reality (hours struggling alone with pencil and paper) into entertainment (savant at the blackboard with a choir singing).

  • Not a Bouncer at the Door: Peer Review as Validation, Vocation, and the Cure for Insularity

    Start with the mechanics. Two or three experts read a manuscript before publication and test three things: is the question worth asking, is the evidence sound, is the proposed innovation genuinely grounded. That is quality control, and it decides what enters the shared record. But Jacoba de Kock, in Embodied Wisdom, names a sharper function: review is what keeps practice-based scholarship from insularity. Hold on to that word.

    The danger for a practitioner-scholar is specific. You know your setting so well, its people, its constraints, its long institutional memory, that your best practice quietly becomes your practice. It stops being examined. What works beautifully in your clinic or your classroom or your parish may be unusable three miles away. Review pushes back on the drift. It asks one demanding question: would another expert, in another context, recognize this as excellent and be able to use it?

• Technology and Free Software

  • A Workbench, Not a Toybox: Apps and Tools for Research and Writing

    Every tool list eventually becomes a shopping list, and shopping is not writing. I will argue that a scholarly workflow needs three jobs done, keeping track of sources, giving you a quiet place to write, and holding your notes and outlines together as the project grows, and I will sort the tools by job so you can take one from each column and stop reading lists.