GG20200303 -- Eugenics by G K Chesterton Part 1 Chapter 1

"Eugenics and Other Evils," by G.K. Chesterton, published in 1922.

Narrator's Introduction:

For the next few paragraphs I will speak for myself, to set the stage for G.K. Chesterton's book, and to suggest why I believe it is still an important book.

I think G.K. Chesterton explains his book rather well in his introduction, but it might help to start with a sense of the time in question. Chesterton started work on Eugenics and Other Evils in about 1910, but it was not completed and published until 1922. In his own introduction he talks about the period before and after "The War." The war he refers to is now called World War One.

We now have a distaste for the word Eugenics, largely driven by events in World War Two. But at the time this book was published, Eugenics was lauded to the skies as a wonderful idea, and Chesterton was nearly the only person saying in writing that Eugenics was in fact evil. A case could be made, and has been made, that today, though the word Eugenics is avoided, some practices that are in fact Eugenic practices, and some sciences that are in fact Eugenic sciences, enjoy great popularity and engender great public enthusiasm. To which practices and which sciences I refer, is left as an exercise for the reader.

To the Reader:

"...It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses...."

Part 1 -- The False Theory

Chapter One:

"The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt."

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Eugenics by GK Chesterton - the Promo

I'm going to be reposting my old recordings of G.K. Chesterton's "Eugenics and Other Evils."  I heard the other day that the idea is making a comeback.  Again.  And Chesterton said what needed to be said rather well.  He could make a point, stick it in your gut, and make you chuckle when he did it.

And, sad to say, it does need to be said.  Again.  Coming soon to a podcast near you.

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Something of a Disappointment -- BlackWeb Bluetooth Keyboard review.

Got myself a new keyboard to work with my Amazon Fire tablet.  I've had a Bluetooth keyboard to use with the thing, which requires AAA batteries periodically and which is small but not as small as I'd like.

This one is from Blackweb, and is advertised as a "magnetic" keyboard.  Don't think it is, I think the tablet case that came with it is magnetic and the keyboard has metal inside to be grabbed by the magnets.  Not sure, doesn't matter.  I wanted this one because it's USB rechargeable, and about the same dimensions as the Fire so it'll (more or less) fit in the same case conveniently.  Sounds good, right?

Yeah, well...

When they were managing to squeeze the keyboard into that small of a space, while they did a "full" QWERTY keyboard for all the letters, they put the punctuation in non-standard locations, just to fit it all in.  I've been a touch typist since, say, the late 1980s.  It's cramped-but-fine for letters, but my fingers expect the punctuation to be in The Usual Places.  So I type my letters, stop and figure out where the heck they put the single-quote or the dash, figure out which function key to use to get that characters to type...

Which, sad to say, makes the keyboard pointless and worthless.  If I want to take forever to type something while mobile, I can use the on-screen keyboard.  Or I can use my existing Bluetooth keyboard, which is inconvenient to carry around, and inconvenient what with the battery thing -- but is a usable keyboard.

This was a somewhat clever idea, but the execution sucks.  E.g., I tried to type this on my new keyboard.  Had to stop, didn't feel like typing till 3 am.  If one was -not- a touch-typist, it might be something you could get used to.  But if you're not a touch typist, why buy a keyboard to carry around?

Not quite as bad a purchase, a full-sized keyboard from WalMart's generic brand Onn.  I have three half or non-functional keyboards in a pile to throw out, and I needed something more usable and reliable -- which for me implies a wired keyboard.

So what do I think?  Well, it's a keyboard.  I can touch-type on it just fine.  The characters and punctuation are in the places my fingers expect.  Mostly.

Instead of the home-end-insert-delete and such keys being three across / two down, they're two across three down.  So I have to stop and look where the heck those keys are when I want to use them.  Designers.  Hate 'em.  Tis enough, twill serve.  But for a touch-typist it's a pain in the butt.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

I don't feel verbal right now.  You folks on the Spectrum know what that's like.

My employers have decided to make changes with the beginning of the year.  Because it's January, and you change things in January, so let's change things.

Being on the Autistic spectrum, I deal with change about as well as you might expect.  Extreme stress, anger, severe depression.  They dropped the bomb on the big change for me today.  Because I work on Saturday.

I won't be working on Saturday anymore.  That's not the big change.

I've been working for this company for over ten years, after a prior job, doing the same thing, ended when my employers packed up their carpetbags and left town.  "Displaced worker."   I originally took the job with the promise that it would never require sales.  Never.  They didn't keep that promise, and I stayed, because I'm an idiot.  Or at least I'm Autistic, and while I suck at sales (as is to be expected), I suck more at job seeking.  Social skills are kind of important for job hunting, doncha know?  If you doubt that, don't make any eye contact at your next job interview.

So, in the last few years, they moved all of us to work-from-home.  They gave various arguments, but I suspect it's just cheaper for them, given we pay for the electric and network service for what has to be treated as their office space in our homes.  They had me taking calls on maybe 10 different inbound programs.  Thought I was doing well, and then...

Today they announced I'm being taken entirely off all inbound work and doing full-time outbound til God-knows-when.  Basically sales.  Full time.  M-F 9:30 - 6.  Sales.

"Hey, let's have the Autistic guy do sales, that'll work out swell!"

I know it's not because they think I'll be good at sales.  I know it's because they do not value my talents, skills, or decade of experience.  Effectively, they said so in writing.  (Another story I may tell you sometime.)

Ideally, I'd now go looking for a new job and get out of this.  Except it's northern Minnesota in January, and I don't drive.  And I'm over 60.  And while being Autistic makes me mind-bogglingly ill-suited for this job, it also makes me either ill-suited for other jobs or at least a hard sell.  Because they can always hire a younger, non-Autistic person.  And as I mentioned, I'm not a good salesman.

And you know, simply because I've done This Thing for  These Guys for so long, I'll get offer after offer to do the same damn thing, which is a painfully bad idea.

The one talent of mine they really could have used came a few years ago, when they decided to do a podcast.  I saw that mentioned in the company newsletter, and I emailed them to point out I had (at that time) nine years of experience as a podcaster.  Even talked to the main communications guy about what was needed.

Did I mention I'm not a good salesman?

They picked someone else to do the podcast, who had never ever done a podcast.  But she'd gone to college, and they (also college grads) understand people like themselves.  And I don't know, but I'd bet she's not on the spectrum.  They did four episodes over a three year period... and stopped.  You know that rule-of-thumb where if you haven't done at least five episodes, you haven't started podcasting?  They don't know that one.

I know why it failed and what needed to be done differently.  But they haven't asked, and they're not going to.  In my more cynical moments (and it's hard to get more cynical), I suspect someone in the C Suite said "we should have a podcast!" and someone else got stuck with the unwanted project.  Now they can say, "Well we tried, and it didn't work."  Not Invented Here, laissez faire capitalist version.

So anyway, change.  Deep dark depression, excessive misery.  Not considering "a permanent solution to a temporary problem."  But those of you on the spectrum know how it feels when it becomes so urgent to Do Something that you can't do anything, can barely move, can barely breathe.

So, I slept all day.

Change.

Up and Down

Listening to Terry Fallis' 2012 novel "Up and Down," his third I believe.  I'm trying to listen my way through all of those available as podcast feeds.

The idea is that a PR firm is given the task of reinvigorating public support for NASA and and Canada's CSA.  The new guy (David) throws out a brainstorm for a contest so a regular citizen of each of the countries gets a "working" trip to the ISS.  (They would be doing some of the work up there, not just staring out the window.). The selection of the vetted candidates would be made by a random drawing.

It may be a 2012 thing.  But an' t'were me, I'd do more of a "America's Got Talent" thing, with perhaps periodic interviews or minidocumentaries about each of the top X contestants, and the audience voting for their favorite candidates.  A drawing is like the lottery, people are interested till they find out their number wasn't drawn, then they're off to something else.

Have them do the voting and they have some ownership of *their* candidate. And if their candidate doesn't win, they were still part of the process, and they're still invested in the success of The Whole Thing.

Then again, Terry has decades of experience in PR, so I suppose he'd know better than I.  And it's likely a moot point; closest we came to Citizen Astronaut was Teacher in Space -- which didn't turn out well, no fault of the Teacher in Space idea.  Maybe someday.

"I blame you for the moonlit sky...."

FIR on Technology # 3 - Markdown

Listening to a podcast from 2016 (cause that's how I roll) from FIR Podcast Network where Chip Griffin talks about something called Markdown.  The idea is, rather than mousing around and clicking buttons, or typing truly arcane HTML, one types their content -- and in appropriate spots, one adds a few characters as part of the text to create special format items, headers and bulleted lists and whatnot.  Sweet!

Being old enough that I still own a sliderule... I learned how to use most of this back in the day when we wrote actual letters, stuck them in envelopes with stamps on them, and gave them to some guy in a blue uniform.  I also learned formatting by creating newsletters that got printed on paper.  And I learned by using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

I still prefer the idea of WP over MS Word.  Microsoft created Word kinda backwards in my humble opinion.  Spend an extended period making your document all pretty, create a bunch of formatting stuff and put in graphics and all that, and then if you have any time left, maybe do some actual writing.

WordPerfect was written for people who learned typing by typing, who learned to create content by creating content.  Once you'd written what you wanted to say, then you went back and added on any fancy formatting stuff and graphics, if needed.  If it wasn't needed, if you were one of us, well, then you didn't put it in.  Start by writing content.  You may well be able to stop there.

I have yet to use Markdown.  But what I admired about Markdown from Chip's description is, you can create a Markdown document without using a mouse -- another strength of WP.   A couple decades down the road, I can certainly flip back and forth from keyboard to mouse to keyboard to mouse with reasonable facility.  But if I want to get actual content created without wasting time, use the keyboard.  Because that's what it's for.  Straight-up keyboarding, once I've learned what is where, is much faster. And with muscle memory, as with typing itself, I honestly couldn't tell you what key combination I just used -- I think what I want to produce and my fingers respond.

So I look forward to doing a bit of fiddling with Markdown.  Sad to say, I've lost most of the WP muscle memory I had, though when I want to print something my hands still start toward the right keys to get WP to print.

In a larger sense, I still recommend Play Episodes in Order on podcasts.  It is especially educational where the podcast feed goes back a few years.  You don't just hear the current commentary about The Next Big Thing.  You hear what they said about it when it hadn't proven itself.  Investment guys back in 2010 saying Google isn't a good investment, and Facebook is a fad that'll soon be gone.

It's history. If you want to understand what is there, you should understand why it's there and how it got there, and what it replaced.

Here endeth the sermon.