Old favorite pictures of Barb Waksman

Black Canyon of the Gunnison 

Before we were married.

Organizing without leadership

It is too bad a leader is chosen to help organize a union (or other) who, so often, ends up becoming corrupt and, minimally, loses track of the values of the organization. 

I dream of software for a social medium that automatically guides a group towards its organizational goals, without any need for a corruptible person to lead the effort or any need to compromise the identity of its users. If it functioned smoothly and simply, it could revolutionize politics.

An alternative to immortality

The idea of immortality sounds like torture. Same for heaven, where - paraphrasing Mark Twain - you are stuck with smarmy people.

What would be nice would be to pass into a state of pleasure that persists infinitely. For me: surrounded by the smell of hay-scented ferns and the sound of blue jays crying in the woods nearby. 

Perhaps this could be accomplished if at the moment of death ( or what appears from the outside to be a single passing moment ) I am like Achilles approaching the tortoise - getting half way there in each of my internal moments, taking an infinite amount of time to enjoy each one. Let's hope something like that happens.

Fried Shrimp

I just cooked a surprisingly good dinner. Probably the best fried shrimp I ever had. How is that? You ask. 

Well, I had some frozen shrimp, in the shell, and took 4 of them out of the freezer, put them in the fridge for the day, then finished defrosting them on the counter, at the end of the afternoon. I dried them out, dusted them thoroughly in flour (salt and pepper too) and fried them in avocado oil for a few minutes on each side. I timed it so I could eat the shrimp with rice and boiled arugula, with a little soy sauce.

Now I want to tell you that something happened with the flour on the outer surface of the shrimp shells. It turned the shells into something like potato chips. Although I peeled off the shell while dripping soy sauce on each shrimp, it had retained enough of the cooking oil along with the soy sauce that the whole bite was still delightfully greasy. Also there were bits of the crispy shell still un-removed that I did not mind being in the bites. I had discarded the shells on a side dish but I enjoyed them so much, I ended by eating all of those shells as well, except for the little tail flippers. 

So I am telling you, there is something special about frying flour outside the shell. The little, fried legs were particularly good. Or maybe it was the avocado oil,

Waiting for Barb to get a Covid test

Waiting in the parking lot of "Convenient MD" in Falmouth:

A proposed Twitter algorithm

Instead of suppressing hate speech, how about promoting consistent and complex subjects- as expressed through a series of posts - or - threads. For example it should not be too hard to detect grossly off topic comments once the "subject" has been detected.