Month: June 2020

Day 26: June2020.org

I was planning on finishing the post about disc golf today, but I started watching the live stream of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and felt as though there were more important things to write about.

If you haven’t heard of this movement, please take a few minutes to go to june2020.org, and read up on it. And if at all possible, please donate what you can to help.

I watched the live stream for over an hour, and am more convinced than ever that we cannot improve our country by looking at one issue and focusing on that. Instead, it is an over-arching, systemic issue that has not arisen by accident. It is by conscious design. It needs to be addressed as a system: things such as poverty, mass incarceration, abandoned veterans, gerrymandering, unending war, etc., are not individual issues, but all symptoms of the same evil design of the society.

I chose the word “evil” to describe it, as I can think of nothing that better exemplifies what evil means. Imagine not caring about what happens to some people, as long as you profit from it. Imagine not caring about millions of people living in poverty so you can have more. Imagine not caring about people escaping violence and persecution and denying them help just so you can keep your race’s percentage of the population from diminishing even further. Imagine not caring about democracy so that you can prevent people from voting who might not want to sustain the status quo. Anyone as cold an uncaring as that, who would willfully cause millions upon millions to suffer, is the epitome of evil.

Please go to june2020.org and help in any way you can. Then continue to speak out against this unjust society, and vote for people who will at least keep it from getting worse until we can nurture a new generation of leaders who can lead us to where we need to go.

Day 25: Disc Golf Numbers, Part 1

When you start playing disc golf, you have to select the discs you will be using. One disc manufacturer, Innova, came up with a rating system for the flight characteristics of their discs, and it proved useful enough that all manufacturers have adopted it.

Stamped on every disc is a set of numbers that look like this:

Each of these numbers represents a different characteristic of the expected flight for that disc. They are, in order, Speed, Glide, Turn, and Fade.

Speed represents how hard the disc needs to be thrown in order to achieve its ideal flight. It ranges from 1 to 14. The higher the speed, the harder you need to throw the disc. In an earlier post I wrote about my difficulties getting one of my disks to fly, and that was because I wasn’t able to throw it hard enough, as I’m just a beginner. It takes time to build the strength and refine your technique in order to achieve the high speed throws that such a disc requires. The disc I was using had a speed of 12, and I wasn’t even close to being able to throw that hard.

High speed discs are drivers; i.e., when you need your throw to go a long way. More distance on a tee shot is almost always good, but you don’t want to lose accuracy, especially on a tight course. My home course is typical South Texas scrub, which includes a lot of cactus, so you don’t want to end up there! Below is where I ended up in one of my early rounds – another foot or two and it would have been painful to retrieve!

Ouch!

Speaking of distance, the second number in the ratings is Glide. This describes the disc’s ability to remain in flight, and ranges from 1 to 7. A disc spins when thrown, providing a gyroscopic effect, and also has a wing-like shape, which provides lift. Those two together determine how long a disc’s flight will last until it starts to drop. This is why the Speed is important: a harder throw will provide more lift and more gyroscopic stability, and the disc’s design is optimized to take advantage of that. For beginners, who can’t throw at such high Speeds, the driver discs are designed to Glide further by maximizing loft at lower speeds. For a beginner, the trick is to find a driver that flies the furthest that you can control. That generally means finding the highest Glide number for the highest speed you can reliably throw.

That’s enough for one post. I’ll continue tomorrow with explanations on the second two numbers, Turn and Fade.

Day 24: An Open Mind

I pride myself on always keeping an open mind. I like to think of myself as free of prejudice, and always looking for the good in others. I’m sure many of you do, too. It’s tough to see your blindspots sometimes, though.

I was born and raised in the New York city area. I lived for nearly all of my first 40 years either in or within a few minute’s drive from the city proper. So when I moved to Texas in 2008, I was a bit afraid – after all, how is a New York-style liberal elite atheist ever going to fit in there?

I was in San Antonio for all of 2 days before I had my first encounter. I was at a gas station filling up my car (a Civic Hybrid with NY state license plates) when a typical Texas pickup truck pulls up to the pump behind me. The driver’s door opens, and out steps a large man in full cowboy regalia: cowboy boots (of course), jeans, big-ass belt buckle, plaid shirt. He looked like this guy except he didn’t have a cowboy hat on – but I’m sure it was in his truck’s cab:

man wearing green plaid shirt, jeans, tan boots, belt and cowboy hat.

“OK”, I thought nervously, “I’m about to get my first ass-kicking!”. I could see him looking at me and my car with a serious expression on his face. After a little while he calls out to me “Hey – you from New York?”. If you know what a Texas accent sounds like, be sure to read his words with that accent, because he sounded just like that.

Given that my car had NY plates, I answered that yes, I was from New York. He then asks “What brings you around these parts?”. I got a little more nervous, expecting to be met with some sort of “we don’t like your type around here!” aggression. I replied to him that I had gotten a job here in San Antonio, and had just arrived in town.

He then breaks out in a big smile, and says “Well, welcome to Texas!”.

I thanked him, but immediately felt terrible. I had looked at this man, seen his appearance, and assumed that he was some backwards, hate-filled redneck who was looking for any excuse to kick my ass. Instead, he was a very friendly and warm person. I wasn’t as open-minded as I had imagined I was. I had let a stereotype control my perceptions of another person.

I think of this event a lot these days, especially with the news of white people calling the cops on black people because they “didn’t look like they belonged there”. We all have these stereotypes, and need to be mindful of them to keep our irrational reactions in check. Getting rid of those stereotypes is a process, and we all have work to do.

Recognizing that we all are not perfect in no way excuses acting on those perceptions as if they were fact. I do hope that the Karens of the world eventually see themselves and their biases and become a little more aware that some people just look different than you do, and that’s OK. I do admit to being skeptical of this change happening anytime soon, though. Attitudes sometimes take a generation or more to change, and the systemic racism in this country is very deep-rooted. It may take longer.

Day 23: Master

The tech world is reconsidering its use of the term “master”, as it has an association with slavery. Several years ago debate began about renaming the Master/Slave database replication design with something that did not conjure those horrible images from our past. Suggestions like Main/Secondary, or Primary/Replica have gotten traction, and several products have switched to these less offensive terms.

Last week GitHub announced that they working on replacing the name “master” in its service with a more neutral term, such as “main”.

Similar efforts are underway to replace the use of “whitelist/blacklist” with color-neutral terms such as “acceptlist/denylist”. All of this is being done in response to the increased awareness of the systemic racism that underlies so much of our society.

There has been some backlash, of course. While it was difficult to deny the obvious connection with “master/slave” to racism, some people are objecting to these latest proposed changes as being empty gestures. After all, the term “master” for a git branch doesn’t have a corresponding “slave” branch; it simply signifies the main/primary branch for development. Likewise for “blacklist/whitelist” – the term “blacklist” has its origin in 1639 England. “Whitelist” was coined later as the opposite of blacklist. Neither of these choices for color names had anything to do with racial notions of one race being better than another.

They also make the slippery slope argument: if we remove the master branch in git, will we have to also rename the master bedroom in our houses, or re-issue Master‘s degrees with a new name, or change our padlocks to some brand other than Master?

The thing about these objections is that they ignore the bigger picture: while those terms may have arisen perfectly innocently, they currently raise feelings of racial discrimination. And if you’re white like me, it’s not your call. Listen to what people of color are saying. If they say that it bothers them, that should be sufficient to make that change.

Changing these names to something neutral is not that big a deal*, but fighting those changes shows a real insensitivity to the feelings of others. “It doesn’t bother me; why should it bother you?” is a way of telling others that you really don’t care about them. Why wouldn’t you want to do these very small things in order to demonstrate a bit of empathy?

*git branch -m master main – was that so hard?

Another example along these lines is the word niggardly. It has absolutely nothing to do with race; it simply means “cheap” or “in short supply”. But why use a word that is so close to such an offensive term (you thought of that word when you read “niggardly”, didn’t you?) when there are so many perfectly good synonyms that avoid that association.

Choosing to use terms when you are conscious of its negative association, and have perfectly acceptable alternatives, seems unnecessarily provocative. Of course this won’t “solve” racism, but it is a very tiny step in the right direction.

Day 22: The New Brood

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I raise caterpillars. How do you find caterpillars to raise, though? The best way to grow the types of plants that the species of butterfly you are interested in likes to lay her eggs.

For the Eastern Black Swallowtail, which is what I primarily like to raise, the plants include parsley, rue, dill, carrot, fennel, and a few others.

Parsley on the left, and rue plants on the right

Part of my daily routine during the summer is to check these plants for eggs. They’re tiny and hard to see, but when you know what to look for it makes it easier. I found the group of 3 eggs that Lazarus came from a few weeks ago, which was a bit early in the season. Since then, nothing.

Until last Friday.

29 (count ’em) swallowtail eggs

I began inspecting one of the rue plants, and immediately saw an egg. So I grabbed a scissors and a small container. This way I could trim the part of the leaf with the egg, and save it in the container. I collected that egg, and began checking out the rest of the plant. There’s another one! And another! It seemed that everywhere I looked I found another egg!

After I was sure I got all the eggs from the rue, I moved on to the parsley plants. Sure enough, there were several more on those plants, too. It took some time, but I was finally sure that I had found them all. Back indoors I very carefully arranged the various plant clippings so that the eggs were visible, and took the photo above. Prior to this, the most eggs I had ever found was 6, so finding 29 at once was incredible! Over the next 2 days I found 5 more, bringing the grand total to 34. I’m going to need a bigger housing for them!

Someone asked me why I bring them indoors, where the temperature is much cooler than they would be exposed to outside. There are several reasons, but the primary reason is that it shields them from predators. I did some research online first to make sure that it wouldn’t be harmful to be indoors, and there does not seem to be any problems with it. The results I’ve gotten have borne that out.

Freshly-hatched caterpillars!

This morning the eggs began hatching. As soon as they hatch they start eating the leaf they are on, which is pretty wilted by now, so I add fresh host plant material for them to munch on. Can you find all the caterpillars in the photo above? I can see at least part of 14 caterpillars. There are also 2 unhatched eggs visible, and if you look at them closely, you can see that they are no longer the smooth yellow color of the newly-laid eggs.

Those stripes are the segments of the soon-to-be-hatched caterpillar. I imagine that these are from the 5 eggs that I found after the first batch, as they seem to be a day or two behind in development.

This will certainly be a good test of my caterpillar-raising skills in trying to help 34 different creatures grow to adulthood. I’ll be sure to post about any significant events in that process in the weeks to come.