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Taichung was an easy one hour high speed rail ride from Taipei. Again I have to mention that being from a country that is 50km wide, the idea that one can take a train and end up in a different city somehow still boggles my mind. I have chronic envy for people in europe who can travel to a different culture in less than an hour.
To my surprise while reviewing my photos I didn’t take many street photos. I took many more photos of food, but those would probably appear in a different post. We were less inclined to walk due to temperatures getting much warmer. I like Taichung: there were plenty of alfresco dining options (we only eat outdoors due to covid cautiousness), and we had fun browsing stationery shops. We even had dinner from the original inventor of bubble tea, and they had a ton of alfresco seating.
In Taiwan there are fixed timings for rubbish and recycling collection – they play this jingle and everyone lines up for their turn at the trucks. We think this may make people more mindful of their consumption:
We were dining at a restaurant during a weekend, and owner told us everyone would be at the square. It was such a wonderful sight to see people just playing and having fun:
This reminded us of Cheonggyecheon stream in south korea:
Sometimes the moment happens too quickly so instead of my camera I take quick shots with my phone:
We have been here 7 years ago, and I have almost zero collection of the place. It was meaningful to revisit it with a new consciousness, to see it through a different set of eyes. Both of us were not bullet journalling yet, so there wasn’t any documentation to refer to. However I had swarm checkins, and I kept getting surprised when the app tells me that we had visited certain places before. I appreciate that at least we have a set of photos, though again due to a heat wave back then we didn’t take that many photos.
I think the desire to remember is a form of hoarding life, the unwillingness to let go of what we’ve experienced. But similar to comparing differences between versions of texts, I like to contrast the textures and feelings between the versions of my selves, however vague those impressions may be. Some people may find it meaningless to visit the same place again, but for me the experience is always different and yet somewhat familiar, and that in itself is a form of travel.
Each city has a soul, and it can be a meditative experience to interact with it. I like Taichung’s soul, more than I had originally expected.
I got a US Mail notice to answer a Census form, so being a good American I did. It was a .gov address, and looked like a government form. The initial questions were standard census questions, then they started getting into personal things that I didn't like answering. Then they asked if I was born in the US. That's a really shitty question to ask now. I was glad to see that I could just click Next without answering any question, and they got worse, more invasive, esp considering who the president is, and who he brought with him, so I just closed the page and wrote this post. I would, if I had it to do over again, not answered any of their questions, or maybe stopped at the standard Census questions from years past. #
One reason I want to bring blogging and social media together is so I don't have to think about where I will post stuff. This is really important. I want my blog to be a complete record of everything I write publicly. The way our online writing world has been siloized, basically no one has that. We're going to try to fix that, and not with just my software, but by setting some new standards for interop, extensions to RSS, so that there's no exclusivity to making software for writers or publishers. That's what I mean when I say something is "on the web." If your system is not 100% replaceable, today, they you are not on the web and should not claim it. If you're thinking about freedom, btw -- this should be part of your big picture. So many smart people don't want to know how our networks work, and that makes you a victim. And it's not that hard to understand, no matter what people have led you to believe. #
I keep coming back to this -- ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I've been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you'll see its significance. You didn't write it, I didn't. Each of us may have contributed a little, and isn't that what we want? To help build the base of human knowledge? It gives our lives meaning. Sometimes I wonder how much value people place on themselves and so little on progress. I think we all want our lives to have meaning. Well here you go, it doesn't get more meaningful than this.#
But while such trials could undoubtedly result in enormous benefits for the children involved and their families, Fletcher-Watson is still sceptical about their depiction as therapies for autism, profound or otherwise. She would prefer to see them characterised as treatments for intellectual disability.
"I believe that when people talk about these single-gene cases of autism, they are being disingenuous," says Fletcher-Watson. "They are talking about single-gene causes of intellectual disability, perhaps many of whom are also autistic. But there is funding available for research to address autism, active parent campaign groups and all sorts of resources, in a way that there is not for intellectual disability."
In other words, there’s not really any money, per se, in researching intellectual disability, so genetic researchers round up a bunch of autistic people who also have an intellectual disability and simply call it autism research in order to get funding. In effect, they are studying the wrong genes.
This is vaguely akin to the fact that the only autism “treatment” that insurance, including Medicaid, will pay for is the fundamentally discredited and deceptive (and yet so-called “evidence-based”) Applied Behavioral Analysis, so either providers just inflict ABA on autistic people or—sometimes, apparently—just call what it is they do “ABA” in order to get paid for it.
(Never forget.)
The only other thing I’d note from the article is that it once again portrays the options of what kinds of autistic people there are in such a way as to leave me out.
But while this can offer huge benefits for these families, the concept of genetic research is not viewed with universal positivity across the autistic community. Autism is a vast spectrum, ranging from those with severe impairments in physical and mental development which will never allow them to live independently, to others with far fewer support needs who view their autism as an identity and advantage, and oppose depictions of autism as a disorder.
“Some of us,” as I’ve said “are neither high support needs nor savant polymaths.” As the one-time subhead of my former autism-specific blog continued:
As the pendulum swings between coverage of autism as the one to coverage of autism as the other, people like me just get clobbered in the head as the bob goes by.
Beyond all of that, I don’t have much to say about genetic research into autism, although I do understand the reluctance and the criticism. I just haven’t engaged with it much, and (in fact) I participate in research from SPARK (Simons Powering Autism Research for Knowledge) out of the Simons Foundation, whose payments occasionally are the difference between being able to afford food and litter for my cat and not.
Make of that what you will.
The party has just arranged for passage aboard a pioneering (and experimental) Elvish airship. Here’s a deck plan (only needs a “you are here” dot!) to help them get their bearings.
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I received my shiny new Framework 13 today, so I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts on the device.
I'm going to keep this deliberately brief as I'm planning to write something more in-depth as I get more time on the device. This is merely a bulleted list of my initial thoughts, having only used it for a few hours.
Some of these opinions will probably change as I use the device more.
Overall I'm happy with my purchase. The Framework 13 doesn't feel as premium as my Macbook, but that doesn't surprise me - very few things do feel premium next to Apple kit.
I'm gonna give Fedora a chance for a few weeks to see if it bakes in, but the multiple niggles are why I left last time - I'm not sure I have the energy to go down the Linux route again. I don't car what anyone says, Linux is not as simple as other operating systems.
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Eventually, the Americans found the mine and began exploring it, ending up at a vaulted door. Here’s the story, as told by Greg Bradsher:
the Americans found the main vault. It was blocked by a brick wall three feet thick…In the center of the wall was a large bank-type steel safe door, complete with combination lock and timing mechanism with a heavy steel door set in the middle of it. Attempts to open the steel vault door were unsuccessful.
Word went up the chain of command about the find and suspected gold hoard behind the vaulted steel door. The order came back down to open it up.
But what to do about this vault door that, up until now, nobody could open? One engineer looked at the problem and said: forget the door, blow the wall!
One of the engineers who inspected the brick wall surrounding the vault door thought it could be blasted through with little effort. Therefore the engineers, using a half-stick of dynamite, blasted an entrance though the masonry wall.
To me, this is a fascinating commentary on security specifically [insert meme of gate with no fence]
But also a commentary on problem-solving generally.
When you have a seemingly intractable problem — there’s an impenetrable door we can’t open — rather than focus on the door itself, you take a step back and realize the door may be impenetrable but the wall enclosing it is not. A little dynamite and problem solved.
Lessons:
Footnote to this story, in case you’re wondering what they found inside:
[a partial] inventory indicated that there were 8,198 bars of gold bullion; 55 boxes of crated gold bullion; hundreds of bags of gold items; over 1,300 bags of gold Reichsmarks, British gold pounds, and French gold francs; 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces; hundreds of bags of gold and silver coins; hundreds of bags of foreign currency; 9 bags of valuable coins; 2,380 bags and 1,300 boxes of Reichsmarks (2.76 billion Reichsmarks); 20 silver bars; 40 bags containing silver bars; 63 boxes and 55 bags of silver plate; 1 bag containing six platinum bars; and 110 bags from various countries
