Springtime has finally arrived in Milwaukee. Just in time for Memorial Day 🙂
Our crab apple tree is blossoming, although the show this year is a little sparse. I’d forgotten that it seems to have an alternating cycle, producing lots of blossoms (and crab apples) one year and then taking a rest the next. Despite missing the luxuriant pink froth of an “active” year, at least we can look forward to fewer crab apples on the ground come late August and September.
Even with fewer blossoms, the pink branches are so cheerful. The bright rays of sunrise this morning reflected a soft pink light that filled our kitchen.
Here is a mystery bush.
At some point last summer I noticed berries on this bush in our backyard, and I remember thinking how strange it was that I’d never seen them before. Then again, maybe not so strange. The next day every single berry was gone! Whatever they were, I guess the birds or squirrels or chipmunks must really love them.
Does anyone recognize this mystery bush by its blossoms? The berries were sort of like tiny grapes, growing in an elongated bunch with one berry per each individual stem jutting out from the long stem going down the middle.
If the berries are safe to eat (for humans, that is), I’m curious to see what they taste like before the critters get them all.
On my Starbucks run while taking a break from making up the final exam for my political science class, I was struck by this sight.
The granite arrow honors the 32nd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army National Guard, made up of units from Wisconsin and Michigan with roots dating back to the Civil War’s famous Iron Brigade. The “Red Arrow” nickname and insignia were derived from the unit’s distinction during World War I as the first Allied division to pierce the Germans’ Hindenburg Line. Milwaukee County’s Red Arrow Park, where my Starbucks is located, commemorates the legacy of this unit’s service.
The flag at half-staff honors former Wisconsin Governor Patrick Lucey, who died a week ago Saturday (May 10) and will be buried today.
And the stuffed animals and votive candles around the base of the Red Arrow monument stone are memorials to Dontre Hamilton, a man with schizophrenia who was shot and killed here by a police officer April 30th. There are many questions surrounding this incident, including what happened between Dontre and the officer immediately prior to the shooting and whether Dontre’s access to medications may have been blocked by or negligently delayed by a lack of availability through the county’s mental health services.
All lives are precious. Each of us matters to somebody else. If we’re lucky, each of us is also loved by somebody else. Seeing these three markers just now reminds me of this universal truth.
Something about this post rings true. A simple goal can represent so much more. So you set that goal. You reach it. And you’re on your way to what you really want! This picture made me smile, and the text accompanying it made me happy. I guess there’s a lot here I can identify with 🙂
When you set a goal you can reach a goal. My only goal was a happy picture. A picture where the bit of scene made me smile. I recognize that as of late I can look at my pictures and say they have been dark. I do not like the feeling at all.
Desire, believe and then you can achieve. These are potent words if you let them work for you. It taking a look back I realized my fight had disappeared. The fight is back in me. I found my mojo again. I have goals. I am unstoppable when I have goals.
By being true to who you are at the core you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.
For today’s post, head over to my Milwaukee School of Engineering blog. Julie Henning, a graduate of MSOE’s Technical Communication program, is now a travel journalist and entrepreneur. Last Friday she was a guest on Wisconsin Public Radio talking about the widely varied travel destinations available in Wisconsin. The audio link to her interview is included.
Uh . . . right. How dumb do the spammers think we are? Pretty darn, apparently.
I’ll admit to feeling a little rush of happiness when I saw I had a new comment on one of my posts and read these opening lines:
You’re so interesting! I don’t believe I’ve truly read something like that before. So nice to discover somebody with unique thoughts on this subject matter. Really . .
But then I realized how empty the comment was, devoid of any specifics. And the next lines gave it away:
[T]hanks for starting this up. This website is something that is required on the web, someone with originality!
So complimentary! Naturally I was suspicious 🙂
I pasted that last sentence into Google, and guess what? It shows up all over the place, with additional variant forms that employ simple word substitutions (“needed” for “required”; “internet” for “web”).
The nice thing about WordPress is that most spam goes straight to the spam folder. I never even have to see it, although I do check now and then to make sure someone legit hasn’t gotten shuffled over there by mistake, which has happened before. Because I moderate all comments, I see and approve everything before it goes up. The downside is that people responding to a post don’t have the satisfaction of seeing their remarks go live immediately.
But the upside is that I can catch nonsense like this before it can establish a presence on my blog pages. Like some kind of insidious fungus.
For today’s post, head over to my blog at Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Hub, where I’ve written about the Grohmann Museum’s exhibit of steam locomotive photography by the famed O. Winston Link. Plus I share a fun background story about the photographer with a Jake Gyllenhaal connection 🙂
Basically today’s article talks about how retailers will soon be able to analyze their customers’ behavior and demo/psychographics.
“We see the indoor location market exploding,” Solomo founder and CEO Liz Eversoll said. ” . . . You wouldn’t build a website today without analytics, and tomorrow you won’t have a location without intelligence.”
“We think every location in the world will be a smart location over the next few years,” Eversoll said.
“Smart” in this case means a building is equipped with sensors that can pick up the presence of a smartphone, triangulate its location and potentially ping the phone back.
Stores already have the ability to track Internet-enabled devices (iPods, smartphones, etc.) when a user enters a Wi-Fi zone. If the device’s Wi-Fi is turned on, that is. I rarely think to switch my Wi-Fi off, which means that the minute I enter a department store, my device is spotted.
Here’s the part that creeps me out. In conjunction with the store’s security cameras, any store personnel who wanted to “analyze” my shopping behavior could figure out who I was. My movements could be tracked until the moment I made a purchase. If I used a credit card, the store would then also have my name and lots of other convenient “analytics” information.
A while ago I read an article that described how Microsoft wanted to sell software to police departments that would link all in-store “private” security cameras with outdoor “public” security cameras. Great for solving crimes. But maybe also a great source of “analytics” revenue?
My new GM vehicle is equipped with OnStar. Great safety feature. But now GM knows where my vehicle is at all times. If I’m in an accident an operator will apparently start talking to me on my vehicle’s phone. But if the phone can be activated from afar, does that also mean that someone could be listening in on any “private” conversations I might have in my vehicle?
Do I sound paranoid? I’m not. But I’m starting to connect the dots and realize that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. For a long time the more future-embracing folks among us have been telling us to get over the whole privacy hang-up. Well, there’s really nothing to get over anymore. Privacy is gone.
Drones the size of insects (no kidding) can be outfitted with cameras. Think there’s anyplace you can go for privacy that an insect can’t get to?
What other interesting, creepy things have I read about lately? Well, Digital Trends had an article on April 10th about a new product that’s a tiny glass capsule designed to be inserted into your body, most likely your hand, containing a chip that allows you to interact with compatible devices just by waving your hand. Kind of like The Clapper, the sound-activated on-off switch that allows you to switch off a lamp by clapping your hands together. Except now you can do way more than that with just a swish of your finger.
At its heart, this chip alters the relationship between human and machine. No longer does a person merely operate a machine; that person is the machine.
Last summer videos of car “hackings” were making the rounds, and some have speculated that the death of journalist Michael Hastings last June in a fiery, high-speed car crash was actually an assassination. I have no opinion. There’s a fine line between legitimate suspicion and wacko conspiracy theories, and I just don’t know enough about this case to even comment. But it sure was enlightening to see the videos and to realize that computers have made automobiles vulnerable to takeover by outside forces. If you missed those videos, you might want to take a look at this one.
Makes me want to keep an older vehicle on hand, just in case. NOT that I’m PARANOID 🙂
Remember the Y2K hysteria? Computers make our lives better, no question. But what are we giving up in exchange?
A software bug took out power across a huge swath of Canada and the U.S. in 2003 (see the map below, from Wikipedia).
During the massive blackout, people couldn’t even refuel their vehicles to escape to somewhere that still had power because all the pumps at the gas stations were powered by computers. I wonder if it’s even possible to find an old-fashioned mechanical pump anymore. Remember those? They made that “ka-ching, ka-ching” sound as the numbers rolled? 🙂
Ray Kurzweil’s ideas on the coming “Singularity” predict that things will start changing for humans big time in the next ten years. Fifteen years ago I wouldn’t have believed it. But I believe it now. Bill Joy published an incredibly provocative article in Wired way back in April 2000, titled “Why the future doesn’t need us” and subtitled “Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.”
The gist of these articles is that humans will merge with computers, and the changes will happen so gradually that we’ll barely notice . . . or object. By the end of the 21st century, they say, human beings will no longer exist in their current form. Nor will humans any longer be the dominant “life” form on earth. We will exist to service the machines we have created.
In one article I read, which I couldn’t easily find to link to just now (but I’ll keep trying to find it and post if and when I do), it was postulated that humans will have a symbiotic relationship with the dominant artificial intelligence (AI). At that point we’ll serve a function similar to the one currently served by gut microbes in our own human bodies. That is, we’ll live in a culture that is complex and meaningful in its own right, but our ultimate purpose will be to maintain the machinery of the larger system.
A very chilling thought. And frankly one that creeps me out. Humans reduced to intestinal bacteria?
Maybe this future is inevitable. But for now I’ll do whatever I can to avoid “selling out” my freedoms and privacy in exchange for the ease and practicality of “smart.” I’ll keep a dumb phone for as long as possible. I’ll keep one of our ancient non-computerized vehicles in decent operating condition. I’ll read print instead of electronic texts whenever feasible.
That this will be hugely inconvenient, there is no question. But as Thomas Jefferson is credited with saying, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
As is all over the news, today marks the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings near the finish line by two brothers with presumed terrorist motives.
The Boston Globe has a short article about the brief ceremony held earlier today at the spots where each of the two explosions occurred. The brother and sister of slain 8-year-old Martin Richard laid a wreath at the site of the first explosion, and a second wreath was placed down the street at the site of the second. Two police officers will stand on guard with each wreath all day.
As events unfolded last year and the public was introduced to conflicting accounts of who Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was, I wrote a blog post that examined the troubling cloud of ambiguity that surrounded him. Part of what drew me was the stunned disbelief expressed by people who knew him that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could possibly have been involved in such a terrible act.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev returned to the campus of the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth after the Boston Marathon bombings. He attended classes and went to a party.
“He was just relaxed,” the unnamed witness said. Tsarnaev led such a typical student life after the bombing that even after his photo was released as a suspect, some who knew him didn’t make the connection. “We made a joke like—that could be Dzhokhar,” said a 22-year-old resident assistant at the dorms where Tsarnaev lived. “But then we thought it just couldn’t be him. Dzhokhar? Never.”
According to an articlein yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education, the UMass–Dartmouth campus was evacuated as a precaution once it became clear that Tsarnaev was a suspect, and his dorm room was searched for possible bombs. A young woman who lived in that dorm expressed the same confusion as others when interviewed. So many of the terrible things that happen, from terrorist attacks to mass-shootings by social outcasts, are connected with people who appear to have a screw loose, she said. In the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, she was at a loss for an explanation:
You usually get an indication of somebody you shouldn’t be around. Now that that is shattered, what do you do? Am I supposed to start worrying about going to school? Am I supposed to stop going to college?
I wrote this very short memoir/essay as an exercise at my writing group’s meeting yesterday. Because I haven’t posted in over a week, I decided to share it today.
The Truth About Statues
When I was very young, I thought that statues were actually dead people encased in concrete. It made sense, as every statue I’d ever seen appeared to be a well-known dead person. But one statue greatly troubled me. It was a child with wings, an angel gazing down into a dark pool of water.
“Mommy,” I asked once. “Was that a real little boy they made that statue from?”
“Probably,” she said.
“Did his parents want him to be a statue?” I persisted.
“Probably so.”
The thought appalled me. “Would you ever let me be a statue?”
“I suppose,” my mother replied. She was busy ironing and watching her soap opera on television. “Would you like to be a statue?”
Emily January Peterson has an excellent post today, “Girls’ Studies: Violence,” over on her blog The Bookshelf of Emily J. I was going to leave a comment there, but I realized there was so much I wanted to say that it might be better to respond with a post of my own.
Emily J.’s essay analyzes a song, “He Hit Me,” originally performed by The Crystals. In it a girl sings about how her boyfriend hit her when he thought she liked someone else. It “felt like a kiss” to her because that’s when she knew he truly loved her. If he hadn’t, she tells herself, he wouldn’t have gotten so angry. At the song’s happy ending, the boyfriend takes the girl in his arms “with all the tenderness there is” and kisses her. That’s when she knows she “is his.”
After discussing the song and all it implies about power and ownership historically in relationships between men and women, Emily J. mentions her own first boyfriend. They were fifteen and in high school. He constantly did things to make her look stupid or hurt her, but she had thought his behavior was normal, if immature. Before doing this assignment for her “Girls’ Studies” course (she is in graduate school, working on a Ph.D. in English), she had never heard this song before. Now, after analyzing the song’s lyrics, she realizes that her boyfriend was actually violent rather than immature.
Reading Emily J.’s blog post sparked a memory of my own, something I haven’t thought of in years. There was a couple in my high school who had an abusive relationship. Actually he was the violent one; she just continued dating him. He was captain (or one of the captains) of our football team. In a small town like ours, where nearly every adult had graduated from the local high school and the whole town turned out for the Friday-night games, football players were a pretty big deal. All the guys in our school liked him. When we told them how mean he was to his girlfriend, they just said they had never seen that side of him.
One day in our senior year, the couple was walking down the hall in front of us between classes. They must have been arguing because suddenly she cried out and ran into the girls’ bathroom, where presumably she thought she’d be safe. He followed her inside.
My friends and I exchanged stunned glances.
And then something happened that thrilled me. Our newly-hired girls basketball and track coach must have seen what happened. Next thing we knew, she had rushed into that girls’ bathroom, pulled him out by the arm, shoved him up against the wall, and gotten her face right up in his. I don’t remember what she said, only that she was yelling at him.
Finally. Finally, someone was taking action and standing up to this bully. And it was a woman! Not the principal, not the football coach, not the other guys on the team.
Except we didn’t think of him as a “bully,” exactly. We didn’t even really have adequate language back then to define him or describe his abusive behavior. The phrase I recall us using was that he “treated” his girlfriend “badly.”
One edition of the “Chicken Soup” series of books for kids has an essay by a girl who was being molested by a family member. She didn’t know that’s what was happening, though. She felt very uncomfortable about the way the men in her immediate and extended family treated her but couldn’t express herself in a way that would make them stop. Then one Sunday a visiting preacher at her church gave a sermon that used the word “incest.”
Suddenly everything became clear to her. Once she had a word for it, she understood the concept. By naming the acts, she gained power over her circumstances for the first time.
It has been a long time since I read this incest essay, but I’m pretty sure it is in Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul. Pretty disturbing stuff. The comments on Amazon include several 1-star reviews from parents unhappy that their kids were unwittingly exposed to such graphic subject matter in a book that promised on its front cover “101 Stories of Courage, Hope and Laughter for Kids ages 8–12.” That age range seems quite young for stories of incest and sexual predation. Hardly the uplifting tales one expects from this feel-good franchise.
Yet, on the other hand, maybe kids shouldn’t be too sheltered. Without exposure to ideas and language, you don’t recognize what you’re seeing when faced with it for the first time. You feel helpless to act because you can’t articulate why something is wrong. And absent that articulation, you feel vaguely guilty yourself, like maybe somehow you’re at fault for the thing that makes you uneasy.
You confuse conflict and drama with romantic passion. You think anger is an expression of love. Getting hit feels like a kiss.
It’s confusing. I acknowledge the irony of my awed reaction to the girls basketball and track coach’s somewhat physical (violent?) response to the bully’s violence. Sadly, there’s even more irony to this story. This guy had multiple abusive relationships, and in the end he was shot and killed by the brother of a woman he was dating. Sounds like justice to me. What goes around comes around. But the brother went to prison.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are both credited with turning around the old Code of Hammurabi to say that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. Christians are supposed to turn the other cheek, literally offering the other side of their face to be struck after someone has hit them.
I’m awed by the courage required for that response to violence, too.
“This website is something that is required on the web, someone with some originality!”
Uh . . . right. How dumb do the spammers think we are? Pretty darn, apparently.
I’ll admit to feeling a little rush of happiness when I saw I had a new comment on one of my posts and read these opening lines:
But then I realized how empty the comment was, devoid of any specifics. And the next lines gave it away:
So complimentary! Naturally I was suspicious 🙂
I pasted that last sentence into Google, and guess what? It shows up all over the place, with additional variant forms that employ simple word substitutions (“needed” for “required”; “internet” for “web”).
The nice thing about WordPress is that most spam goes straight to the spam folder. I never even have to see it, although I do check now and then to make sure someone legit hasn’t gotten shuffled over there by mistake, which has happened before. Because I moderate all comments, I see and approve everything before it goes up. The downside is that people responding to a post don’t have the satisfaction of seeing their remarks go live immediately.
But the upside is that I can catch nonsense like this before it can establish a presence on my blog pages. Like some kind of insidious fungus.
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