Sun Feb 19 08:04:03 EST 2017

Slept from eleven to seven. Woke briefly around four.

High of sixty-one and mostly sunny today!

- Golang study
  Done.
  Listened to some music, and got caught up with pretty much everything up to concurrency.
  I need to understand interfaces better.
- D&D something
  Done.
  Made a few notes about the Upper Works of Castle Brezelbier.
- Dinner with Yvonne, Kate, Isla at 3:30 at Yvonne's
  Done.
  Nice time.
  Ryan was able to make it.
  We all walked down to the park after dinner.

Maybe I'll turn around on this, but after a few days with a Washington Post trail subscription, I'm disinclined to continue it.
- Comics sized for 640x480 display in a world about the jump to 4k displays.
- Dramatically inconsistent font size choices require constant zooming.
- The "Tech" section is too shallow and consumer-oriented to be of any interest.
- Many of the sections don't post new stories every day. What?
- Half the sections are of no interest to me (Local, Classifieds, Sports, etc.). That's a way of stating a bigger problem: how can any general-audience publication complete with RSS feeds selected and aggregated by me?
- Somewhat interesting:
	- Lifestyle: The Intersect
	- Entertainment: Museums
	- World (although I get much of the same from NPR and the BBC World Service)
	- Politics

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/02/01/the-cult-of-the-paranoid-medium-post/
> When Tom Pepinsky, an associate professor of government at Cornell University, saw the [coup] “trial balloon” post, his expertise led him to a very different possibility from the same evidence. In an article rebutting Zunger’s approach, Pepinsky argued that it was possible “everything that Zunger identifies is evidence not of a deliberate planning by an aspiring authoritarian, but of the exact opposite: the weakness and incoherence of administration by a narcissist.”
> But more than that, the point of Pepinsky’s piece was to identify the flaw in trying to completely understand and explain the Trump administration’s intentions in real time at all: “observational equivalence.”
> “We have two theories of why something is happening, and yet we cannot tell which is the ‘correct’ theory based on the data that we observe,” he wrote. 

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678576
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/science/how-norway-avoided-becoming-a-fascist-state-20170216
> Meanwhile in Norway, the Norwegian Workers’ Party crafted a vision that seemed both radical and reasonable and won majority support for their view despite the dissent of a very small Communist Party. Grassroots movements built a large infrastructure of co-ops that showed their competency and positivity when the government and political conservatives lacked both. Additionally, activists reached beyond the choir, inviting participation from people who initially feared making large changes.
> Norwegians also took a different attitude toward violence. They chose nonviolent direct action campaigns consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and occupations—a far less fearsome picture than Nazi Brown Shirts and street fighting. Norway therefore lacked the dangerous chaos that in Germany led the middle classes to accept the elite’s choice of Hitler to bring “law and order.”
> Additionally, activists reached beyond the choir, inviting participation from people who initially feared making large changes.

That John Grant album is a lot of fun. Reminds me of Frank Zappa in some ways. Like Frank Zappa crossed with LCD Soundsystem.

Mars and Venus are out. And Orion.

Breakfast: carrots, coffee, chicken pot pie
Lunch: macaroni
Dinner: pasties, salad