Ryan's Wisdumb

  It's been a bit since I updated this blog.  Looking back at the past few years, my blogging activity seems to pick up in October and fall off as Spring arrives.  It has happened often enough that I can call it a pattern.  I guess that makes sense, as I spend a lot more time doing things outside when it isn't cold, snowy and dark.  As the days grow shorter, I have more time to think rather than do, so I turn to this blog for an outlet for all that thinking.  Many of my thoughts over the summer that are now ping-ponging around in my head are not defined enough or worthy enough to warrant a full blog entry about them, so I present them to you here as some wisdumb bites. Healthcare As you know, nothing gets me riled up faster than believing I'm being ripped off.  Therefore, I find it impossible to abide our healthcare system.  The for-profit nature of it is absolutely insane.  The billing, and the huge number of people required to administer it...

 Things have been relatively quiet in the Wisdumb garage recently, though the old Prius seems to have a lot more scratches and dings than it used to.  Hmm. That's a mystery that is stumping me.  Oh, and there is a newly-licensed driver in the house since my last installment, who primarily drives the Prius.  And since there is a newly licensed driver, this was a good excuse to add another pony to the stable, so there is now a 2025 Nissan Leaf SL to use for around-town driving.  The incentives to buy that car were crazy good, so buying it new was cheaper than most of the used ones we were looking at.  Someday I may do a writeup on that car.  It serves its purpose, but has a lot of compromises.  So, I guess I mean that things were quiet in that nothing broke and needed fixing.  Except for a sailboat and trailer that was given to me. Before I get any further off track, today's discussion is about TPMS sensors and the tire places that use them to ...

I read a book a decade or so ago, published in 1997 called:  The Fourth Turning An American Prophecy . The book proposed a theory for predicting the future based on cyclical repetition of the past along with the mechanism behind it.  The centrist-leaning conservative authors, historian and economist Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, argue that history repeats itself in roughly 80 to 100 year cycles (about one long lifetime and called a saeculum) due to the constellation and archetype of generations that are influenced by events in the same way as their cohort generation 80 to 100 years in the past. Background on the Fourth Turning Generational Theory Per the theory, there are 4 generations influencing society at any given time (with smaller numbers very old stragglers still hanging on but not influencing society anymore and young children being born to the next generation).  The archetypes used for these generations are Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist.  Each ...

What comes to mind when I say, "Philosophical Society"?  For me it conjures up images of the famous Royal Society with groups of gentleman scientists gathered in a grand room lit by candles with overstuffed chairs and dark wood paneling discussing the leading scientific theories of the day while contemplatively puffing on a pipe.  It's a romantic image and probably has little basis in reality but I would have loved to be a fly on the wall listening to the likes of Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday and Ernest Rutherford discussing their theories and breakthroughs.  In my mind, science in the 17th through 19th century was largely accessible to the average person with some curiosity about the world around them.  The body of knowledge to draw on was limited and a lot could still be learned with simple experimentation.  Many of the scientific breakthroughs of those eras came from wealthy men who had time to pursue scie...

  It's been a while since I've had a good rant.  At least publicly.  Much like a volcano that slowly builds up pressure over time until there is a massive explosion, I have been absorbing the stupidity, faults, flaws and outright incompetence of the various products I interact with daily, and now it is time for me to erupt.  If you recall, Spotify was the target of my last good rant about software development .  Today's rant is brought to you by Yahoo! I have been using Yahoo! since the very early days of the World Wide Web.  I remember when it was hosted at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.  It was an innovative idea, and I immediately set it as my homepage in my NCSA Mosaic browser.  At the time, there were no other web-based aggregators of content (at least that I knew of) and Yahoo! provided a great starting point for finding content I was interested in (kids- this was before Google even existed).  For a fun trip down memory lane, take a look a...