My challenge to invent something every day stumbled

Tags

A spillproof box., Accepting stupid challenges, Evolution of a box, Inventing new stuff, Thinking about boxes

For three weeks I have been successful in coming up with an invention every day. I was challenged with inventing something every day by my Monday afternoon book discussion group. I immediately refused to accept, saying that even Thomas Edison wouldn’t accept such a monstrous challenge. But they wouldn’t relent. I was bullied into it after three refusals. The only way such a challenge could be sustained for very long was to solve some of the really tiny problems that are ubiquitous.

One of the ones I brought in for their viewing last Monday was a small box used in restaurants for leftovers.  The box I had been given the day before had a tendency to pop open, so I worked on that problem for a while and cut out of the cardboard lid a little hook that would catch the side of the slot opening. It worked better than the original box and didn’t accidentally pop open as easily.

However, one of the guys said that sometimes food leaked out the top corners when a box was tipped on its side even if it didn’t spring open. Tonight, when I should have been thinking about the new paradigms for the Unitarian Universalist fellowships, I was trying to solve the box problem. I was thinking inside of the box, when I should have been thinking outside of the box, and my thinking and writing time was used up. I stumbled upon a simple, obvious once you see it, solution to that problem.

Perhaps, someday you will get to use one of my new boxes in a restaurant.

Each day contradicts the earlier ones

Tags

Contradictions, My struggle with contradictions, UU Affirm and promote

One contradiction after another. Even the smallest insignificant things seem to require adjustment the next day. Yesterday, on my morning walk with Debbie, we saw a dandelion with 64 blossomed stalks and thought that was amazing and far beyond the bounds of normal reality. Today, primed to look at dandelions, we found one and counted 113 blossomed stalks. And, further along our path, there was a long stalked one that I picked, carried home, and tossed out onto my garden, so I’m going to break off this for a moment and go fetch it. … I’m back, and it measures 2 feet 3 inches. Some dandelions we saw in people’s lawns don’t appear to have any stalks. None!

I bring up this trivial measure of contradiction because I have been rewriting some documents of Unitarian Universalist favored beliefs. It is for my own pleasure, as I have absolutely no authority to be changing those things. My problem is easy to see if you have been following this blog for the last few days. What seems okay, even good, one day seems flawed the next day. What seemed like a clarification yesterday appears as fog today. The word pettifogger pops into my mind. That’s a term of derision applied to all of those unscrupulous lawyers representing the other side of a legal question with silly unrelated arguments. How many times must I rewrite my restatement of We affirm and promote, before I am willing to affirm and promote that short proclamation?

If even my simplest reality is changing every day, I will always be anxious, and that’s a worry, but I will also be entertained, and that’s a pleasure.

A single dandelion with 64 blossoms

Tags

Dandelion, Dandelion with 64 blossoms, Evolution of dandelions

Dandelions have changed a lot since I was a child. I remember them with a single tall stalk with a single blossom that turned white with the little parachutes that we all enjoyed blowing into the wind. Sometimes they had a few more stalks. Nowadays, dandelions that live in lawns with mowed grass have no stalks at all and their blossoms are sometimes below the average grass height. I did see some a couple of years ago, hanging over a nearby irrigation ditch, that had long stems, perhaps eighteen inches.

A dandelion with 64 blossoms

A closer look at the dandelion with 64 blossoms.

Today I found what appeared to be a single dandelion and I counted 64 blossoms. I picked a few of these blossoms and put them in a plastic bag and put that bag in with our collection of garden seed packages.

Dandelions in the place where Clancy our horse friend broke his leg and was put down an hour later.

Turning around and pointing the camera directly across the street, we view a field with a patch of dandelions exactly where Clancy died. There are far more blossoms than ever before because all the ponies, horses, cows, sheep, and chickens were removed when the Park Board purchased this farmland. Next year a park? All of the blossoms appear to be singular, like the olden days.

Usually, I go to some effort to eliminate all of the dandelions from my property, but this one is special, so in our next growing season I’ll plant a few in a pot inside my sunshine-filled southern window and see what happens.

But, why wait, maybe I can start a new species off with a little help?

 

A third try at a new invention every day for a week.

Tags

4 point crayon, An elder glove, An invention every day, box that stays closed, car headlight dimming device, car key noise suppressor, Insulated mailbox, window visualizer

For two weeks I was able to invent something unknown to me that I thought might have some usefulness to the guys that challenged me to invent something every day. Today, before my presentation of this third week’s efforts I challenged them: “Create something new every day until our meeting next Monday.” Among the seventeen present, there was a lukewarm response to that idea.

A 4-point crayon – This was an easy spinoff on the 4-point pencil and 4-point ballpoint pen idea of last week, but I showed them a physical embodiment of the concept.

A box that stays closed – I presented two boxes, one which had the usual tongue through a slot with a cut tongue to the side that was intended to prevent the main tongue from pulling out. It doesn’t work well, so I added another small tongue and catch point which does prevent the box from opening accidentally.

A car headlight-dimming device – This is a small piece of dark transparent plastic material, commonly given out as an eye protector after an eye exam, which can be cut and attached to one’s personal night-driving eyeglasses. Attach separately to both lenses in the upper left quadrant of the visual field a piece of this dark transparent plastic material. When driving the driver may easily tilt their head slightly down and slightly to the right and dim the brightness of the oncoming automobile’s headlights. That simple act makes the remaining three-quarters of the visual field much easier to see clearly.

An elder glove – Old people are prone to bruising the back of their hands by accidentally hitting them against things. For example, by raising their hands from under a dining table and hitting the table’s edge. Thin old skin is easily bruised by that trivial accident, but it takes weeks for the bruise to disappear. This is easily prevented by having a lightweight glove, even an open glove on the inside of the hand, but with a stiff material on the backside of the hand.

A car key noise suppressor – A small 1-inch by 3-inches flat piece of 1/4-inch thick foam with a tear-off backing material that exposes an adhesive so the foam can adhere to the place where the keys hit the dashboard beneath the key insert slot.

A window visualizer – Some cars do not have metal surrounding their driver side window or front passenger side window, and thus the window when in its normal up position might sometimes hit a person’s face as they enter or depart the car. This happens because the glass has low visibility. A simple solution to that problem is to place a two-inch piece of white adhesive tape over that corner of the window which makes that glass corner more visible.

Insulated mailbox – The materials received in mailboxes may be there for hours and get very hot in the sun, or very cold on cold days. Some items such as prescription drugs are sensitive to extreme temperatures and are ruined by being subject to the environment inside of a mailbox. That can be prevented by lining all of the inside walls of a standard outdoor mailbox with insulation material and by placing a container of water inside the mailbox too. This will slow daily temperature swings to a more moderate average.

Little problems are ubiquitous and some of them can be coped with by a simple device.

 

 

I’m getting dumber by the day

Tags

Dumb and dumber ideas, Dumb behavior, I dig deeper into problems, Mental survival

Today at a meeting with a dozen friends I mentioned that I had invented something every day for the last several days. I wondered out loud if I could do that for a month.

That was the question I asked myself back on January 1, 2008, when I began writing this blog, and I have published a post every day since then. Way back then I didn’t think I had thirty things I could write about, and now WordPress stats claim I have written 4,190. Usually, it doesn’t take more than an hour to write and do a single rewrite, and then Debbie proofreads my efforts and makes corrections. That cleans up the egregious crud in a few minutes and we go about our lives.

Making a new invention must obviously be taken in a very loose way because I’m not going to invent the wheel, or Facebook, or Amazon, or Google, or Wikipedia, but I have designed some substantial improvements on equipment for removing snow from roofs, and I have designed a super cheap slide rule, I mean less than a penny, that could become ubiquitous and requires zero electricity or web access to operate. And, as posted yesterday, I made a greenhouse that has a few novel improvements. 

These old dudes challenged me to accomplish this create-a-new-invention-every-day  nonsense, and asked me to describe my favorite one at our weekly meetings. The reason I titled this post “I’m getting dumber by the day” is because no one with a modicum of intelligence would stick their foot that deep into their open mouth.

I thought I was getting better about not being stupid, such as not critiquing women’s choice in clothing, because of some fervid feedback,

and now this!? Another one step forward and slipping three steps back.

Update on World Population History

Tags

A smoothed estimate of population, World population explosion

Update of Probaway.wordpress.com World Population history tweaked

29 September 2014

The exact number of people living on Earth at the present moment from http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ is 7,264,145,184. This is an estimate, and the historical figures are clearly even more speculative. The previous Probaway post World population history graphed and smoothed took several authorities’ estimates and drew a more easily remembered line through their speculations. Below I have tweaked those charts to make them even easier to memorize.

Update 2019-04-13 11:40 PM PST = 7,697,122,700

People like to think the population is leveling off, but the worldometers current estimate of population growth this year is 23,042,700.

World population history estimates from the United Nations, Hyde, McEvedy, and Probaway

World population from 5000 BCE to 2025 graphed on a logarithmic chart. The data is smoothed but within error bars of demographers.

Another fact is that our population is living at a higher energy-consumption level than  previously.

A balance between food availability and population will be maintained.

NIKE shoe news

Tags

evolution of fair trade, NIKE morality, NIKE shoe news, People replaced by machines

Recently I had an extended conversation with some friends about Nike’s continuing problems. We have been reading Joshua Hunt’s University of NIKE so our conversations are based on more than our passing opinions. A book discussion group is so much more interesting when the participants have read the book and are focusing on particular chapters for a given afternoon’s discussion.

I have struggled for years in various ways to help give opportunities to all people and even to save the human race from extinction. So far I’ve been successful. We’ve all been successful with that one, and lucky, too. But the playing field in hourly income for all people is horribly out of sync with fair play. On page 71 CBS reported that Indonesian factory workers were being paid $0.19 per hour to hand assemble shoe parts, like soles to uppers, that were previously made by automatic machines.

My problem with my friends and with myself was when I found myself quoting page 74 where the accounting firm Ernst & Young report that a North Vietnam factory had workers who were forced to work more hours than allowed by law, making them more likely to become injured or killed on the job.

My challenge to my friends was that Nike was in close competition with many other shoe companies and were falling behind Adidas. They were both having their shoes manufactured by foreign companies that would deliver them the quality they demanded at the lowest possible price. I said that if they were dealing with the top management of a company to deliver the product then they had very little responsibility for how the product was created.

Those business purchasers were like you and I when we each go into a shoe store and consider the qualities of the shoes and then buy the lowest price item that satisfies our desires. We don’t consider all the thousands of people involved in getting those shoes to our local shoe store, at least we didn’t think about that back in 1990, when Nike was getting started. It wasn’t up to us as individuals to make these decisions, because there was no way for us to know the conditions of all of those people.

Because of the storm that arose over those issues there was an evolution of fair trade practice and we now have fair trade agreements. There are markers on many products we buy today and those little symbols do try to give us a general look at the integrity and fairness of the providers of the products we are buying. It isn’t enough, but it’s something.

Our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness is a road filled with many crooks.

Logophilia * The love of words and word games

Tags

Logophilia, Love of word games, Love of words, Salmon River, Shoup Idaho, The River of No Return

The Bend Public Library hosted our second meeting of Logophilia this afternoon and we few, we precious few, had a good time. Words, words, and more words were the subject of our conversation. We had made no effort to publicize our meeting as we are trying to figure out what we are up to, if anything. There was a high percentage of returning participants from our first meeting, and from that fact, it appears that we aren’t too boring, and we had a few new attendees who claimed they wanted to come to our next meetings.

One curious thing we discovered was that half of the people present had been to Shoup, Idaho (45.3769, -114.2769). It’s very remote and too small to even been called a townlet. If you don’t think that is weird, watch this YouTube video. I lived for a week or two in a tent about fifty yards up the road behind the gas pumps the summer of 1949 and swam in the Salmon River just across the road from the gas pumps with some other kids. One of the guys, Dick Linford, had been a Salmon River tour operator for forty-five years going right past Shoup, and past the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, and on down The River of No Return. Watch that 1954 movie clip with Marylin Monroe and Robert Mitchum and see my uncle Forrest Earl Eidemiller doing the actual maneuvering of a barge down the river. He lived many miles downstream, (~ 45.5426 -115.2504) near the river in the most remote part of the lower forty-eight states, with no roads to his home, and he brought in his yearly supplies, of food and books, on a barge. There are some spectacular views in the video clip. Of course, Mitchum was the guy doing the amazing stuff in the close-ups, but Earl was the one doing the real thing in the distance shots. For the movie, they needed someone with real experience who could do the right stuff, and that was Earl.

Anyway, Dick Linford, author of Halfway To Halfway and Back was at our Logophilia meeting and had earned his living running adventure tourists down those same rapids many times.

Logophilia has a future and it will probably function best if we publish a theme for each meeting, like “Special words you know that you think we should know.”

Fourth post-op day and my medical ducks are bored.

It is now the fourth day since I had inguinal hernia surgery. Since then I’ve talked to a couple of guys about my surgery and compared to theirs it was duck soup; that is, there was only a little pain and that was when I did something I could control and not do again. Except for when coughing or sneezing I had no pain events that were serious enough that I considered taking the Oxycodone-Acetaminophen that was prescribed to me. I would rather observe my pain and avoid doing what caused it than suppress it and be dulled to my world of experience.

I don’t like having these drugs around and will dispose of them tomorrow morning if I sleep well tonight. I am doing some experiments with making an anti-sneeze/anti-cough spray. My current experiment is to dissolve a cough drop in whiskey and then spray that into my mouth when there is a tickle in my throat. There is nothing to report yet. As previously reported, if I could get a cough drop chewed and dissolved in my mouth in fifteen seconds, it would suppress the cough. By making the spray I can get that solution into my throat in a second or two but like I said, I have nothing to report yet.

I attended my usual conversations with my friends and they were as exciting as ever, perhaps a little too exciting because I overstated my opinion on something and offended a dear friend. Sorry. Later, in the afternoon I attended a scheduled group discussion, where I showed off a photo of my recovering incision. I held it life-sized over the site. Several of the guys mentioned what appeared to me as nostalgic memories of similar experiences.

On to more serious things. Because of this assault on my life, a modest assault, I have been thinking about my eventual death and what I wish that I had done, but haven’t done yet.

I don’t have much ambition to make money; actually I’ve never had much of that, and I do have enough to get by. Thanks to my medical bills being covered by the Veterans Administration because of my two years of military service as a pilot in the USAF, I haven’t been driven into desperation by this hernia operation.

I have some personal friends who treat me well, and I attend the UU church every Sunday and do a few routine good works there, so there is a mild feeling of satisfaction from that. I have several other small social groups that I attend regularly, and even though I miss the exhilaration of living in Berkeley for fifty-one years, what I am doing is meaningful enough.

I have Debbie as a multi-decades-long life companion and we get along so well that people often mention that in passing by. We rarely argue about money, or politics, or religion, or anything else except for the meaning and pronunciation of words. Even though I have been crankier than usual because of my medical problems the last few months, she has been a constant and reliable companion.

In my discussion group with about eighteen guys this afternoon I said something that was a bit much for them. I said that I didn’t mind dying or being dead, and didn’t expect to have any personal afterlife to look forward to; that instead, I felt comfortable returning to the nonliving matter of the Universe. That the Universe is such a spectacular thing that I feel good about becoming once again an unthinking part of its grandeur. That little speech didn’t get any hurrahs from those people, most of whom said they were praying for an afterlife where they would be reunited with their loved ones, but I felt that it might give them a feeling that everything would be okay even if that afterlife is what not happens to them personally.

Clearing one’s own mind from unnecessary stresses and helping other people to live more abundantly is enough.

Religious fanatic?

Tags

Excessive social activities, Religious fanatic?

I don’t consider myself to be a religious fanatic and yet I have attended every Sunday service at the UU for over seven and a half years. That is, I haven’t missed a single service since being fully settled into my new home here in Bend on May 1st, 2011. In addition to that I have been attending the 1st Presbyterian book discussion without missing a single event since beginning, and in addition to that I haven’t missed a single Atheist Saturday morning breakfast for years, and in addition to that I haven’t missed a single Socrates discussion and was a couple of times the only person to show up. Also, I always meet my old dudes at the Crows Feet Commons for coffee and discussion on weekday mornings. And, yes, I have written 4140 of these Probaway blog posts which sometimes discuss “religious” issues, like Jesus’ Beatitudes and his prayer. I do a lot more than just show up at these events, I participate in all the activities. For several years I attended an active Spiritual Awareness group and enjoyed it very much, and was even elected to the board and directed a few meetings, but I was forced to leave when I wouldn’t sign a document that went further than I was willing to go into belief in the supernatural.

A google search brought up Pew research on religious landscape and I discover that I am very unusual in my frequent attendance and probably very unusual in that I attend seemingly conflicting groups. My religious views are liberal but not particularly unusual and I attend these meetings because I just like talking about a wide variety of things from different points of view. What my personal religious belief boils down to is, treat everyone as well as I can by doing physical things that are helpful to them.

That way of helping people has had some strange developments. For example, I make a point of tipping the employees at restaurants, coffee shops and other places where people are working for minimal wages. I do this because they are doing work that helps them thrive and it helps everyone they serve. Those kinds of actions deserve reward and encouragement. However, I don’t give money to panhandlers because they are not doing something that I consider helpful to others or even to themselves. I feel that a gift would be empowering their inclinations to self-destruction and I want them to thrive. I do treat them courteously.

I’m still a kid trying to understand why the world and the people in it behave the way they do so I can help them get to where they are going.