Category: Guest Contributors

Tom’s World – 12JUL2025 – The Joy of Reading

photog Guest Contributors, Literature, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

The gift of the ability to enjoy fiction, or nonfiction for that matter, has a requirement: an attention span exceeding a minute or two. And that seems to be becoming increasingly rare. Both my parents were readers, likewise myself and two siblings.

I don’t remember exactly when I started reading Sci-Fi but it was as a teenager somewhere along the line. But I suspect that I’m one of the few people on earth who, while in grammar school, read every single volume of Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover.

I really wish that Nook and Kindle were available back then. I started with Nook probably around 2010 and now use both. Point being that every book I’ve read in the last 15 or so years is still available to me. When, in 2009, I moved from my last residence in metro Atlanta where I had lived for 20 years, I “donated” a long bed and a half pickup truck loads filled to the brim with mostly paperbacks. What a loss! And that wasn’t the only donation made from that house.

I could have that entire mass of books on around several gigs on a thumb drive with lots of room left.

But at least I have the last 15 years and I find myself rereading. +The device keeps perfect order, organizing by order of purchase, title or author.

Tom’s World – 05JUL2025 – Subject Isolation – Part 2

photog Guest Contributors, Photography, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

Need a method of picking a subject and isolating it. You can do that with depth of field, lighting or post processing methods.

Picking a subject and isolating it.

DSC7394
DSC7394

Isolating the subject. This is post processing using Photoshop. Sorta like cheating.

BTW: This Dauntless dive bomber is the last existing aircraft to have actually taken part in the Battle of Midway.

DSC03221m
DSC03221m

Isolating a subject. This museum, the US Naval Air Museum onboard NAS Pensacola, is so crowded as to make it extremely hard to come up with an effective photo due to all the visual competition.

DSC00744m
DSC00744m

ArthurinCali Has a Post on California Illegals

photog ArthurinCali, Current Events, Guest Contributors ,

Arthur discusses the dysfunctional California policy toward illegals and its consequences.

“Platitudes about the “Rule of Law” regarding due process and expedited deportations sound comical from a state like California that has the most sanctuary cities and routinely flout federal immigration law. A state that spent over $9 billion in 2024 on healthcare coverage for illegals and is on track to spend nearly $11 billion this year. Adding in additional costs from illegals in the areas of education, housing, and law enforcement pushes this figure even higher. One does not need a degree in economics to know this is unsustainable for the long-term, and will continue to add tension around the immigration issue.”

And he includes some nice photos of some of California’s natural wonders.

Tom’s World – 16JUN2025 – Minnesota

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors, TomD ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

Trying to remember what year, I was out of the Marines and hadn’t yet returned to Ga Tech, working as a carpenter. So it had to be 1971 or 1972. We were framing some houses and somehow a traveling pair of carpenters on sabbatical from some college in Minnesota ended up working with us. I wasn’t exactly the same person then as I am now but I was leaning even then. We were on an similar age so I ended up being fairly good friends with the pair so we ended up in a number of discussions with them and found they had a decidedly liberal bent. My biggest disagreement with them was the space program, this was the early 70’s and the Apollo was going full bore.

Their position was that no money at all should be spent on space exploration until earth was a paradise. I thought that was total madness because that condition would never be met and I thought (still do) that the advances from the various programs were the ultimate salvation.

Hard core liberalism must be in the water up there.

Tom’s World – 14JUN2025 – How Many Humans, Redux

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

 

Obviously, you could plot a graph with the x axis being total human population and the y axis being some amalgam of average human well being. I’m pretty sure it won’t graph as an exponential function, that’s impossible. It would be a bell shaped curve with maximum human happiness occurring at some level and declining in both direction, more population or less.

The population peak, I suspect, will occur at the point of maximum available resources, including energy per capita. And I also suspect that increasing resource availability largely pulls population as opposed to population increase pushing resources.

Total available energy per capita may well be the bottleneck. But there will come a point at which the total resources of a large but closed system cannot continue to increase to match.

There are probably other limits. A future with the average population density on earth being that of Hong Kong, no matter resource availability, would explode.

Maybe we could start hollowing out large asteroids, spin them, and make little worlds. That’s a common SF scenario. Or a Dyson sphere, one of those of radius of the earth’s orbit would give 1.21 x 10^17th square miles of living space.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 09JUN2025 – Fate

photog Current Events, Ed Brault, Guest Contributors , ,

It’s interesting when something happens, and you think, “If I had left 5 minutes later”, or “If I hadn’t tossed X-item into the car.” I had one of those in 2018 when I was trying to get a hotel reservation for a hurricane evacuation. We needed a pet-friendly room, and just as I was about to hit the “Confirm key” >BLIP< -room gone! So I scrambled and found an alternate 30 miles further on. While there, we rescued a little tortie cat who had apparently been dumped at the motel. We added her to our clowder and named her Florence, for the storm that brought her to us. She crossed her Rainbow last April due to FIV and Thyroid trouble, but we loved her, and she had a good life with us, and we miss her.