Tag: TomD

Tom’s World – 23JUL2025 – The Next Generation

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors, TomD ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

There is an INTENSE need for people who can think and have experience + a work ethic, goal driven. I’m a subset of one out of 300 million+ so I can’t exactly extrapolate but—

Like photog, I’m an engineer but at 76.8 years old, a supposedly retired one. To keep myself in touch and engaged, I have a part time consulting business out of my house. I do design and in addition, construction contract and managing, budgeting and walk dogs on occasion.

I have people coming out of the woodwork begging me to work for them. They tell me that the current system isn’t generating people like me at the needed replacement rate.

I have all the clients I want (2), I work all the hours a week that I want (15) and I have no intention of getting back in harness. I like the commute from my bedroom to my home office but I have problems keeping the cats off my plan table.

Before retirement, we spent a couple of years trying to hire and train my replacement. A number of recent grads but there seemed to be at least something wrong with every one. No motivation, no work ethic, can’t get out of bed, not interested, HUGE holes in their knowledge base, scatter brained. One of them could not generate a simple logical excel based budget to save his life.

I can’t do the typical retired thing, traveling, visiting grandkids, etc. My wife is well into Alzheimer’s but not quite yet a nursing home candidate. So I’m tied here. But if I’m not working on something interesting, I’m pretty sure I would rapidly dry up and blow away.

Tom’s World – 18JUL2025 – It’s the Real Thing

photog Guest Contributors, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

For the last decade or 4, I’ve not had more than 1-2 soft drinks per year and most times not even that. Don’t ask me about craft beers though I don’t even do that now.

When I can get some of the new, I’ll definitely try though. My boyhood memories of the 6 oz bottles with condensation running down on a hot summer day—. When we first got picked bottles, we’d bet a nickel to see who had the bottle that came from furthest away; the bottlers had their location cast into the glass.

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

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.