It isn’t that I am reading less, just that what I am reading is not triggering any need to blog about it. I don’t see any change on our accelerating slide down the slippery slope to the apocalypse and I am sure my reader(s) are getting tired about hearing ‘police state this’ and ‘police state that’, so I don’t see any need to belabor the obvious (or at least obvious to me). Politics are still as infuriating as ever. The wacko right continues to paint Obama as the Most Liberal President Ever and I continue to see him as right of center (his recent walk-back on same-sex marriage, after all, is no different than the puppet master Cheney). The idiot rich continue their fantasy existence where even the occasional pander to progressives is considered a stab in the back. If the jackasses are stupid enough to keep their money, or worse, give it instead to the right, then Obama will no longer be incentivized to protect them and might, just maybe, actually back some financial reform. I initially thought those people weren’t that stupid, but I am starting to rethink that maybe they are after all, and can start to envision a day when our government might actually consider putting regulation in place to keep Wall Street from once again destroying our economy just so the rich can get a wee bit richer.
I am attempting to get up-to-speed on computer vision as part of a project I am interested in and find once again (I attempted this before about a decade ago) that I am snowed under by the math. I can’t shake this stubborn conviction that the problem has been made too complex by people who enjoy that sort of thing, yet I can’t get my brain around the state-of-the-art well enough to know if I am full of BS or not (likely am, but being wrong has never had much impact on my thinking process). After all, the only difference between a genius and an idiot is how history treats him; so far it seems history considers me an idiot.
Progress on our greenhouse/pool project is continuing at its snail’s pace. We got half the sheathing done on the pavilion roof last weekend and hope to get the rest done this weekend. It is amazing the difference the sheathing makes, even with the rafters it was hard to envision the space, now it really pops out.
I asked my mother-in-law to pray for rain (she being very Catholic and me, not) and that seems to have paid off. I was really worried that we would have another dry spring and the plants I have tediously stuck in the ground would all croak (something that has happened pretty often; I suspect nearly half the 1,000+ plants I have started over the last several years have died), now I am somewhat optimistic they can get established well enough that they can handle our normal dry summers. I planted a bunch of seeds last fall with the hopes that the lack of transplant will give the plants a better start (generally when I lose something I lose all of whatever species I planted (usually between 3 and 10)), but so far I am not seeing sprouting. I did the same thing in pots last summer (didn’t realize that essentially all the seeds required an extensive cold period before they would sprout) and have few sprouts to show for it, so maybe it just needs some more time, I at least I hope that is what happens.
Our boy is being very much the 7 year old he is and I am finding that I am not well suited to being the father of such. I think I was a better father when he was an infant and a toddler, hopefully I can adjust. Fortunately my beautiful wife is a good mother (except I think she spoils him too much) and for the most part seems willing to take up the responsibility of being the parent. I hope that as he gets older I can become a better father; I like to think I am better with teenagers, but I might be impugning too much on my capabilities.
I am not really good at waiting. I have two high probability projects in the works (aquaponics and biofuel from duckweed), but starting them is dependent on getting the greenhouse/pool done and while I attempt to remain optimistic about getting it done by this fall I find it increasingly difficult to ignore those little voices that tell me it took 3 years to get the house done (though this project is significantly smaller in complexity, it is physically larger). My table-top fusion idea has been substantially back-burnered. I found a very close analog to what I was intending to do (a fusor-based neutron emitter) and found a 6-9 order of magnitude discrepancy between power going in and power being produce (presuming, of course, 100% capture of the resultant energy, something incredibly unlikely). That put a real damper on my enthusiasm as while I am egotistical enough to think I can get an order of magnitude improvement, I am not so egotistical to think I can do an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude (that would be 10). I still think it is worth trying to build a prototype just for the learning, but I might have to leave that off until we have finished most of the construction projects we have on our plate (we are negotiating our next project after we pay for the greenhouse/pool and are leaning toward paving our 1/3 mile long driveway).