Reflections

I went by my favorite local used bookstore recently and found Lawrence Durrell's Reflections on a Marine Venus.  The text seems very familiar, so I'm pretty sure I read it originally just before we went to Greece nearly twenty years ago.

I first became acquainted with Durrell's work through his Alexandria Quartet which I read while in school in the 1960s.  That seemed revolutionary then to me in its style and content.  Looking back on it now I'm thinking maybe the issue was more my own literary naiveté at the time.  Durrell was in the employ of the Foreign Office during his time in the Dodecanese Islands and his views and opinions seem to reflect a now stale colonialist viewpoint.  To be fair I should probably go back and re-read the Quartet which he put together a decade afterward.

Thinking about Durrell and Greece got me thinking about pictures I had made there.  I posted a few on my photography blog over the years, but most were archived on Photonet.  When I looked at them there recently I found that the text of the photo essays I did had disappeared and accessing the photos was a slow process which augurs poorly for their preservation there.  So, I collected the lot and posted them on my Photography & Vintage Cameras blog in three parts labeled Rhodes, Symi and Athens.

Work In Progress

 The sewage system in our neighborhood is undergoing some major reconstruction.  It is projected to go on through November, luckily not directly involving our street.  However, the road blockages are sending a lot more traffic by our house than we are accustomed to.  The upside is some nice opportunities for photographs.

Albuquerque Spring

 The Rio Grande is full of water from mountain snow melt.  Many of the trees are fully leafed, and flowering fruit trees are everywhere.

Missing the Point

 The Atlantic labels the secret-leaker, Teixeira, as a narcissist who mostly wanted to impress his chatroom friends.  That may be true, but I think that falls far short of an adequate  analysis.  Teixeira seems to me to be a pretty typical arrogant libertarian techie who thinks some computer and programming skills implies superior knowledge and wisdom about the world.

That world view was formerly very commonly seen on big tech-oriented websites like Slashdot, but most of those people seem to have migrated over the past couple years to more obscure chatrooms where their faulty logic and ignorance is not likely to be seriously challenged. In fact, Teixeira was the admin of one of those sites, so very unlikely  vulnerable to serious criticism.

There are two important underlying issues to the Teixeira incident.  One is the failure of the country's education system to impart an adequately broad education to most young people.  The other is the resultant gap in knowledge and understanding between generalist institutional administrators and specialist technical workers who are inadequately understood and supervised.  One would imagine that national intelligence agencies would have the resources to detect and deal with such issues, but that is obviously not the case.

There are, of course, complicating political components to the story.  Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, has jumped to defend Teixeira as a white male christian gun culture promoter.  So the Private seems to have pretty much all the characteristics required of a Republican presidential candidate.

Berkeley Falcons Live Cam

 The falcons are nesting again on the Berkeley Campus.

3 views

Four eggs.  One hatched 4/10/23.

-------------------------

Zephyr, Rosa and Luna learn to fly (Berkeleyside - May 31, 2023)

Priorities

 Some NASA bureaucrat recently promoted the idea of a China/US race to gain control of the moon.  Firing that guy would be a good first step toward a rational Space program that actually supports the survival of life on Earth.  The next good step would be to divert all funds currently allocated for lofting humans into Space to funding climate change monitoring and amelioration.

Self Delusion

 The last two books I read by Solnit and Arthur Miller dealt in a large part with the changes brought about by industrialization over the last century, both in our lifestyles and in our conceptions of time and space.  We spend much less of our day occupied with meeting basic needs and the importance of locale has greatly receded.

The disruption of travel during the recent holidays caused by a massive winter storm produced a flurry of interviews of frustrated travelers complaining about cancelled flights and the attending inconveniences.  People these days have an expectation of being able to disregard natural events like that storm, and there is a sense of entitlement to travel anywhere at any time. Interruptions to unlimited travel are seen as a breakdown of technology which needs to be repaired and compensation is expected from transportation providers.

The possibility that people might give more attention to Nature's priorities went unmentioned, as also was the fact that the cancellation of thousands of flights provided a transitory diminishment in the tons of atmospheric contaminants that such numbers normally introduce into the atmosphere.