This blog is just a grab bag of thoughts and useful links. However, as the name suggests it may be interpreted by some as a wee bit challenging, if not, activist. Hence the use of the term "Left" in the title.
The views expressed are strictly my own. The mention of any software or service is not to be taken as an endorsement or criticism.
Right now, on this very day, it's Labor Day 2023 in Canada... How will we use and relate to technology in 10 years, 2034 (it's in the latter half of 2023, so for the sake of discussion will just call it 10 years ahead.)?
This question has been asked in various forms throughout the years but this time around both technology and the society are evolving extremely rapidly. Knowledge itself has changed fundamentally. It used to be you would learn of fact, some tidbit of information and that data was considered for the most part permanent and useful for a long time. Now the platforms and ways of doing things are completely in flux. You may learn something on Tuesday and a month down the road an update to some system you use has completely changed and made that knowledge you gained previously completely moot.
This must drive those in charge of archiving material completely nuts. I mean do you store the data on? What do you know for certain will be around in 10 years. If you store it in the cloud will that service be around. Will the protocols that run the Internet changes vastly. I believe this was one of the problems NASA faced with the Voyager 1 spacecraft years later. They were faced with the old age in computer system which he coded the data and no one knew how to repair it or the language it used was no longer taught. In this situation they had a machine out there in space which was sending information which soon could not be decoded. They were losing their Rosetta Stone. Ultimately I think and I'll put a link to a Wikipedia or NASA article right here for more up-to-date information, they just decided to turn the spacecraft off.
Indeed I have seen the "Compact Disc" be developed, hit the market, and it disappear in about 20 years. Pretty much in 1/5 of a lifetime something existing and then it did not. So how "permanent" will permanent be. Events like this redefine what we society perceived as a long time. Of course I rambled up a video. People seem to like them. Here you go:
I am most interested in how people will change. We have seen remarkable adjustments and also to aspects of what we collectively call "being human". I don't think I'm overstating this, these are fundamental changes and change the very fabric of the individual, especially when you look at it from a societal point of view. My hope is that ultimately when we've gotten over the technology and begin to use it as a tool we will begin to see just how interconnected things are over the long run. Maybe then societies will start to drop the artificial boundaries the human race has erected over centuries and intermingled their creativity and knowledge. It would be a society most foreign to you and I because hopefully they will find this part of human history a bit of an enigma. Considering people of the time creating most of their own problems because we had a mistaken belief in the power of division.
I wonder how intelligent life on other planets has dealt with these issues. As we explore space we are continually surprised by discoveries we never thought of. It shows that the human mind has a lot to expand for and that we are still for the most part wearing blinkers.
Anyway the adventure continues. Let's see if we can make it work shall we? :-)
People today seem so sensitive. Everything is taken personally. I find myself wondering if there needs to be a course taught in school on interpersonal social skills. We have lost a great many of the activities in our educational systems that used to be the bedrock of the skills. I think there was also a greater sense of not only community, but an awareness of other communities. Regardless of any particular groups outlook about the other communities, there was really acknowledgement that any particular section of society was not alone.
In contrast, today it seems everyone is hyper focused. Even when you see groups of people and children walking down the street they are all engaging mainly with their devices and it seems to me what they do talk it is not an inclusive event, but more of broadcasting one's own opinion.
As you'll see in the video below, I went for a walk as I pondered this state of social affairs and ended up in a small local forest. That's where these above thoughts really began to hit home, and I found myself feeling a little sad for the younger generation. These interpersonal skills are so important in fulfilling one's life both physically and emotionally. Is it not time we bring attention to these critical skills and honestly start teaching them in school or bringing about some activity that allows people to bond and grow?
In this short video I ponder this thought. Let me know in the comments below if you have any ideas or feedback.
Take care Patrick
PS: The more I consider this question of teaching interpersonal social skills in school, the more I look around me and become increasingly convinced this is the way we must move forward as a society. The impact of not doing so would mean the unraveling of so many fundamental aspects of being human.
Remember when you used go into a coffee shop and everybody would be chattering and discussing a wide variety of things? Even though at times this public discussion would seem loud and overwhelming, ideas were flowing through the air and people were connecting on a very fundamental level. Now if you get on public transit or walk into a Starbucks, it is pretty much totally quiet and the minute someone sits down they are colluding to their laptop and likely plugged in to a local wall socket to recharge their beleaguered and overused battery.
I think this topic may become a series on the blog because as I look at the articles on this site there is a common theme: Humanity and Psychology. Stay tuned and will see what happens. Continue to have a great day.
What if the very way a person perceives their existence varies far more than we ever considered?
By that, somewhat convoluted, question I need to ask if you could talk to someone's mind and experience their thought processes, might they vastly different than yours? I have been thinking about this for a long time as I find myself considering why people behave the way they do. Especially when they are unhappy and yet refuse to change their ways even when given explicit information and avenues out of their situation. I've met people with such vastly different perceptions of the world and ways of going about their daily lives, that I'm beginning to read the question the the supposed "shared human experience"great it might go a long way to explaining the vast differences between people. I'm considering this way down at the fundamentals of the thought process.
If those fundamental building blocks of our reality are in themselves remarkably diverse and unique to each person, then indeed we are all aliens and only normal in the truest sense in relation to our own perceptions.
It is a very intriguing question, and I suspect one that we will ultimately have the answer to. The way technology is evolving I am sure that we will get to a stage where we can begin to decode the millions of impulses of the brain and really look at the fundamental inner workings. I hope to be around to see that, indeed to experience it. Imagine being able to "plug-ins your best friends head". Could you comprehend what you found there? With the way of processing experience be so different, or would it be something familiar.
I hope the technologies which are developed in this regard don't do too much translation, I think there's a lot to be learned from the raw experience. The very things that make us different may indeed be the best teachers.
For those of you that like things in video format. Here's me talking about this very issue. Although things have occurred to me well up in writing this text and things occurred to me while I was doing the video. So like the article each has its own point of view, for lack of a better phrase. Enjoy the differences
Whenever you hear a discussion about someone's mood, or indeed, the topic of being "moody" it is always in the present tense or very recent past. People say things like "Why are they so moody?" and "Their moods are unpredictable." More often than not there is an implied negative connotation along with these statements. Like the mood itself is a bad thing.
Well, let's take the longer approach and include the present and the past. There probably is a message here. Something these repeating moods are trying to tell the person. Looking at "moods" in this kind of light can give one far greater perspective. First off to consider the long term aspect means that you have to pause and consider things. That in itself can be very beneficial. Breaking up automatic routines which in the modern world we all fall into. If when you stop and take notice, the mood itself begins to change, then perhaps your mood is trying to say "This routine is not doing you any good." However up until you stopped and took notice, you were in a foul mood. I mean what better way to stop someone from doing something they truly don't want to do then to put them in a bad mood. However people are also expert at ignoring the signs and moods which are intended to get them to change their behaviours. This is particularly true in the modern world where automatic nonthinking behaviours are encouraged..
I really think "a mood" is often nature's way of getting you to change something you need to change in order to grow. What society and people individually have to do is make time in their day to break automatic routines and check-in with their moods and other signals their body may have. To literally get a dialogue going. I am now convinced that far too many individuals put themselves on a one-way track to all sorts of problems because they are not used to dealing with change.
Instead of dealing with the issue which created the mood, they medicate. This produces a spiral which is going in the outer wrong direction. If you can deal with small issues before they become big then you grow, almost by default.
Then there's the other side of this issue: When people find themselves in a good mood, they happily go along for the ride, but they don't consider do any major degree why they are in a good mood. You could think of the situation like a shopper who doesn't look at their credit card or the receipt when they buy something. They just indulge blindly. This good mood could have tons of positive information contained within. Don't miss this opportunity. There could be all sorts of things that could be later used to help one avoid slipping into a bad mood. Or at the very least, minimize the impact of such a mood shift.
So the message here is pay attention to your moods. They are one of the gateways to understanding oneself.
For those of you that appreciate or like this in a video format. Here it is.
Take care Patrick, and as always leave comments or questions.
(This article is long. Consisting of 41 photos and text. If it is not displaying fully click the article title or click here.)
Note: In order to incorporate all the photographic information, some of the behind-the-scenes code needed to be edited directly. In other words a human was involved in the formatting of this post, namely myself and there may be errors.
If you find any, please report them via the "Contact Us" form on every page.
When I came up with this idea a few weeks ago, it sounded so straightforward; find some of my favourite pictures from the last 10 or 11 years and created a slideshow. Sounds simple right? Well the devil's in the details and it's a good thing I love details 😀. Because then I thought, "Why not allow everyone to download the original photographs.", and that thought led to, "I wonder if there's a way to export all the photo information?"
Well, the answer to all of the above was "Yes". The only question was how much time I had to put in to this little endeavour. But it was too late, I had started a plan and 41 photographs later, combined with some old-school trickery to extract the information from the JPEG files, I had the beginnings.
The video had its own ups and downs. I of course decided to do the whole thing in 4K. Meaning the 13 minute video took over 2 hours to render. and I had to do it several times for various technical reasons.
All in all, it's about 35 hours worth of work. But it was worth it. I will add some comments to the photographs I remember details. Some are in the lower mainland of BC and others are taken from a trip to Trail British Columbia in about 2012. While others come from roaming around Vancouver and Surrey.
Better pictures for you...
"Blogger", the website host, tends to re-compresses any photo uploaded to it and there is a loss of quality, you will note that each picture has a filename below. Clicking on the file name will download the highest resolution photograph I have on my Google Drive. You are welcome to use them in whatever way you wish with no attribution necessary. I hereby place all of the photos in this post in the public domain.
I have adjusted some of the photos in the video version to make it work visually better. The downloaded versions are untouched and were created using the two cameras from Canon. Namely the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III for the newer photographs and the Canon PowerShot SX120 IS for the older images. (These links will lead you to the "Canon camera Museum")
The Video: Summer Photos from 2012 to 2023
So first, here is the 13 minute video which is basically a slideshow. and again it is yours to do with as you wish with no strings attached.
You can watch it below, or you can download the file directly from hereto have your own copy, but be aware of a few things if choosing to download the file itself:
This is the original large video source file. It is 2.73 GB in size, meaning that it will take a while to download.
Unlike playing in through the YouTube window below, which automatically adjusts, to your devices capabilities this is a 4K video. Meaning that it may not play on all devices.
It may be necessary on some devices to right click, or tap and hold, the above download link in order to actually get the file to download rather than play.
For many years, and in hundreds of books there have been countless words written about "Perception" and how it is all important especially with regard to you and the rest of the world. To put it simply it is, how you see things. But there is very little consideration on what you consider perception itself to be and to what degree you can mould the construct of perception itself.
I first this may seem like cyclical thinking because, is not perception the very act of perceiving? Yes it is but like everything else under your control. It can be moulded, adjusted if you like, and it just knowing this that allows you to consider it on a much deeper level. What is perception to you? And just how often in your daily routine are you aware of perceiving something? If you are aware of the process as it actually unfolds you can begin to really zoom in on the origins of some of your emotions as well as physical factors you are experiencing.--- Are you aware of the experience right this moment as you read this article?
Most people in North America look forward to their morning coffee. Some may even smell the aroma as they think about what coffee is to them. The very fact that they can do that is due to their perception of what the perception of coffee is. Now you can start to take this apart and look at the various stages you go through as you think of something equally wonderful. What I'm really talking about here is developing the ability to take any experience and subdivided down to smaller levels, smaller degrees and in that process consider your relationship to the event by looking at pieces of the experience. This can give one the ability to really focus in and slow things down so that what was once invisible now begins to show itself. Whether your reaction is positive or negative this way of looking at things can allow you to really take the various stages of a reaction apart and by doing so alter future reactions.
Of course you can go overboard on this and start literally "splitting hairs" going down to finer and finer details well beyond the point of being useful. Don't get that distracted by this idea. Use it only to the point where you are getting some insights out of any given experience. It might be a good idea to write or record your thoughts as you consider some aspect of perception. Then revisited a few hours later or sometime down the road. Because then I enough will happen to you in the intervening time that you are perception will be different.
This short article is only the results of myself a few days ago while waking up realizing that my perception is my own making and that like a fractal image there is infinite detail and I can take it apart as long as I find the results useful. I wish I had been recording at the time this thought occurred to me because here I am five days later and I can remember the idea for this short article but not what I was considering a moment earlier which brought the to the idea of Perceiving One's Own Perception.
Hopefully this has made some sense, and cause you to pause and reflect on something. Have a great day. If video is your preferred format, then here you go. I expand on this topic a little more. As always please leave comments or ideas below or on YouTube.
This morning I read a quote from Dostoyevsky which fits in very nicely with this topic:
"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task."
Believe it or not everyone has a built in evolutionary based "Cognitive Negative Bias". That is, your mind, if left to its own behaviours always assumes the worst. This was right for the early human species as it saved them from becoming a predator's midday snack. However this negative bias over time became generalized and now in the modern world, it not only does it not serve us well, it actually gets in the way of physiological growth.
It is not necessary to go into examples of negative bias, they are all too prevalent. Rather this article is meant to give you some of my own personal tools to encourage seeing a "Positive Bias" whenever possible. These are things I have learned throughout my life.
To sum them up, they are:
Personal Awareness
Recognizing Habitual Behaviour
Enjoying Effort (literally relishing in the fact that something might be hard to do.)
Every time engage in one of these behaviors, you always learn something.
1. Most of us, including myself, spend a good chunk of our days somewhere between autopilot and grounded awareness. This is the modern survival skill, because frequently you are moving at a rapid pace juggling many things. The problem is that, it has become, for many people, a natural default state; they are slowly lose touch with themselves. In some situations even with their very character. Who they may become over time it's not quite the personality they assume. Everything can change and that includes the very essence of you.
Getting to know various aspects of yourself is critical, because it is the bedrock upon which everything else is built. No one can know everything about themselves because we are always changing, but we can definitely alter the larger and more profound aspects. So, the next time you turn on the TV, YouTube, or other entertainment media especially if it's something you do often, ask yourself to just pay attention to you to the situation you are in. What are you looking forward to? If it is a routine ask yourself what you get out of the routine? Start to take apart the situation in whatever way you want and notice the different aspects. There is so much to discover in personal awareness and it is in these moments that you can find a great many surprises. Encourage yourself to be curious. You are psychologically getting something out of every situation. Start to explore what that might be. Even negative things. What you might call a bad habit has a payoff for some part of your psychology.
2. This leads right into the next item on the list, recognizing habitual behaviours. Again you are getting something out of it. Often can be a way to avoid being aware of yourself. The problem is that habitual behaviours that don't do you any good and can waste a great deal of time getting you nowhere. So you don't benefit from the experience either positively or negatively. --- In sort they keep you stuck. So next time you're eating that big bag of potato chips and you're chewing through them at breakneck speed. Ask yourself what's going on.
3. Just today I was working with someone who was terrified of effort. That is to say, the minute something got difficult for them, he immediately put up mental roadblocks, essentially guaranteeing that they would fail. I have seen this several times now in various people who will always say they want to learn and succeed. My belief is that it is the fear of change ultimately that is stopping them. Everything you've ever done in your life even the most automatic and unconscious things was at the very beginning, difficult. You had to learn how to gain a new skill. But somewhere along the way these people learned or told themselves that everything must conform to their way of existence or seeing the world if you prefer. If it didn't fit their model then it was by definitions "difficult" and doomed to failure. To guarantee this outcome they began to build up all sorts of behaviours to distract themselves while at the same time frustrating themselves. A guarantee the way not to benefit from learning.
Well, in order to learn you must be prepared to change and what you need to learn is that change is a good thing in this context and if something is difficult that is also a good thing. It means you're being stretched and exercised and ultimately growing. So learn to accept difficulty as a positive indicator. If the "wall" is too high, take your time and appreciate the small steps. If you are observant of your accomplishments and your setbacks you will reach the top. You will however not be quite the same person you are at the beginning of the undertaking. It is necessary to let go of the "you" you knew. It may be a very difficult thing at first and it may remain difficult. That is okay. Take the time to understand why. If it is not in your power to see why it is difficult then see if you can come to terms with the difficulty. It will be up to you whether to proceed and integrate it into the situation or to go down another route.
Don't Resist Change, Embrace It.
There seems to be a tendency for people now to insist on having the world presented to them in a way they are already comfortable with and that can lead to a lot of the above difficulty. You may have to change your behaviour. If you really want to achieve a specific goal. That means taking a look at your negative bias and indeed taking a look at the individual you have knowen for all these years who just happens to be your self.
A practical example of people resisting change while insisting they want the benefits of change without the work involved would be the following:
This happened several times every year. Either in my volunteer work or when assisting someone in my building with new equipment or purchases. They get the latest phone with all the bells and whistles. After they've had it for a few days they come to me and they ask can you make this do what I saw in the commercial? It doesn't matter what the undertaking is what the person is often really asking is "You do the work so I can have all the benefits without having to think about it.". And of course things never really work out for them because they do not understand the very future they are attracted to. Even if everything does work after it is been set up they are still somewhat frustrated because they intuitively know that they don't know what's going on. And in order to benefit from an experience you have to understand that experience. Just buying a good camera will not make you a good photographer. You must undertake learning how it works. There is no getting around this if you really want to grow.
So there we have it. The key points of my philosophy in regards to negative bias. My advice throw the negative out and do the work to get the positive in.
I have made a companion video for this article. It covers the same points and also addresses a few other aspects. If you are more comfortable learning it through multimedia then this is for you. It is about 10 minutes long.
In my volunteer work we occasionally run across people who simply seemingly can't resist adjusting everything in sight. Regardless of whatever it is, a cell phone, computer, smart device etc. they seem to have an inbuilt compulsion to adjust things. Even if no adjustment is necessary. This frequently breaks the item and they usually have adjusted more items on the device before we hear about it.
These issues can be really challenging to solve because frequently the person doesn't remember all the things they've changed. So the usual scenario is we fix up the device and the person is happy but I also know that they will be back. This happens frequently enough that it is got me thinking what is going on with these people. Why are they making their lives more complicated. My philosophy is so much simpler… "If the thing works, leave it alone."
Sometimes I think it's a need to control their environment however that is not always the case because if you do manage to get them to leave something alone then there's a good chance they will leave it alone permanently, ignoring all the signals when they should be taking action. Their behaviour is very much like a switch it's either all on or it's completely off and ignored.
Now to be honest and clear I am somewhat the same I can get trapped in a downward rabbit hole of adjusting something until it is perfect, or I frustrated the heck out of myself, which ever comes first. But I am aware of what I'm doing and why. So the rabbit hole adventure doesn't happen too often... Except it just did. If you look at the graphic at the top of this post you'll notice an odd background. I was playing around with my graphics tablet when I accidentally created this. And of course I spent a ridiculous amount of time tweaking everything about it. Now that I think back on and it's kind of frustrating because I know darn well that displays very greatly. What looks fantastic on my desktop monitor may look very poor on the template. Or at least very different. You would think knowing that for certain would mean that I would opt for the safe and reasonable. But no… We can't do that can wait :-).
Tell me your stories in the comments down below so that at the very least we can come to know this interesting behaviour and maybe make it our own and start a new trend in social media.
I wonder if this tinkering and for ever adjusting is more like an addiction for some people? They do tend to go a little odd if you manage to get in the way of their regular routine of for ever twiddling the knobs. I recently worked on an old computer running Windows 7 and the person that owned it had put in everything and it was the ultimate version of everything. As a result this little old computer came to a grinding halt. I cleaned it up for them and told them to be kind to the old machine and consider it more of an heirloom than anything useful. But within a day I heard back from them that the machine was overheating. Upon a little more investigation they admitted they put everything back and perhaps even more. I wasn't mad when I heard this. I think more astonished would be my state of mind.
Around and around these odd behaviours go. The universe really should have provided an instruction booklet for the human race. Not one about culture, but one that deals with getting to know your self.
Do you know people like this, have you worked with them? Even better have you got any insight? Leave your comments below.
Poster announcing free adult education classes and encouraging adults to return to school. Date stamped on verso: Dec 4 1937. LOC's Public Domain Archive
Boy, if that isn't a" sleeper" of a question. At first it seems so innocent. Bordering on simple. One would need only reply with the yes or no answer. But I think the question belies something much deeper and critical. I think the roof question is "Is the Internet getting in your way?" This is something we could debate and feel free to put your comments down below but speaking personally I would answer "Yes" for myself.
The Internet and indeed our entire way of communicating currently seems to be getting in the way of efficiently or at least uniformly going through one's day. People have not yet learned how to deal with this much information and the mechanisms we have in place frequently get in the way of useful delivery. Ever notice how many pop-ups you get when you turn your phone on? And let's not even go down the rabbit hole of email. I would read more of it if we had a more useful way to structure and present the data/information. And the sites that purport to give you a "snippet" view of the information I just find it annoying because I really do want to know in detail about whatever I am pursuing.
It is going to be interesting to see what things are like in 100 years although I don't think it'll take nearly that long, for something utterly new to replace our way of approaching information. This has nothing to do with the amount of information a person can digest in a given period of time it has much more to do with the quality of the knowledge gained. Let me know what you think.
Have a good evening everyone out there on good old planet Earth. More in the coming days. This has been just a quick entry for today. But a question like this might even turn into a video over the weekend. Keep your eyes on this page.
Yep, this post is going to be photos that I have taken recently in parks and all around wherever I have found myself lately. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. All photography there part of this particular blog post in the public domain.
I started this last night on a whim so I have no idea what I would've put here but I will make sure that every single photo can be downloaded in full resolution, so all links lead to the full resolution photo sitting on my Google Drive.Standby and will see what happens.😀
All shots taken with a Canon G7 market 3
There are more photos to see on an earlier post I made. Not necessarily from the same camera. This older post is a bit of a time warp. You can find them in the article: Yahoo, it's the beloved weekend! (Free Photos)
I do have a few photographs for purchase up on Displate.
If you've never heard of this company they print artwork on metal with
the result being that the posters are held on the wall by simple
magnets. They ship all over the world.
And Just for the Heck of It…
Here is a variation on on the BEE photo. A lightened up, with saturated colour poster, suitable for printing on 8.5 x 11 paper. "IT BEE SUMMER!" indeed 😎 .
Patrick
PS: If anyone would like the RAW image versions of these shots please let me know. These are in Canon's CR3 format are unedited and of much higher quality. Note however that not all devices can display them. There is also no lens correction. However if you have an idea what I'm talking about they are worth the extra effort.😀
