Quoting Myself on Facebook

Once you get to garb and/or language it's looking more and more like ethnicity. Italians aren't a race on the check box forms, but there's still citizenship and/or heritage.

The computer game experience of designing one's avatar helps kids appreciate the Mr. Potato Head aspects of genomic expression. Permute at will.

We have lots of ways to draw Venn Diagrams, based on a variety of attributes. Midgets could be a race (regardless of skin tone) if we wanted, but we don't want. That's why they say "race is a social construct" because "we" keep changing our minds about what "we" care about. You can't say Latino is a race in recent census forms.

The so-called "races" come and go. In Bible school, they link races to sons of Noah. Those diagrams keep changing as well. Making "Jews" be a race was a project with far more subscribers until recently.

Do people think all native Americans, from Eskimos in the north to descendents of the Incas around Peru, form a single race? Not usually, as that wouldn't be convenient. That would turn too many Mexicans into Indians and we can't have that.

BTW, sickle cell anemia is also endemic around Greece and people of light skin tone (POLST) are afflicted.

Queued

Twitter tweet:

Queued up on Russian Facebook....https://t.co/41FqEFsH1I

— Kirby Urner (@4DsolutionsPDX) June 17, 2020

Chinese Wisdom

Given the time of year, some of us on Facebook were checking out stories from that time, in Beijing, China.

One thing I'm acutely aware of is my "brain TV" and its ability to dramatize situations I never witnessed. Television is good at taking over this process, providing guided meditations, often synchronized to a narrator, but not necessarily.

My imagination has an ability to "flit" so when I picture that cliche scene, say of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, I get away with a pretty low budget rendering.

Nero doesn't have to look like anyone in particular. Why invest a lot on a cliche?  That's a waste of brain power.

However, if I'm cast in the role of movie director, with a reputation to uphold, then I don't want to take a cliche like "the Tiananmen Square Massacre" and spend gobs of time and energy on some poor slob fantasy version. I should get trusted accounts from eye witnesses, film footage, stills.

Today, with lots of camphones, assembling more accurate mental summaries is in theory possible, provided a public so equipped.  Cameras have a role to play in verifying weapons agreements just as surely.

My attitude towards mass surveillance is share the view with the masses.  I'd like to ogle at Picadilly Circus or Times Square as much as the next guy. What's the harm?  Let us watch.  ODOT, our department of transportation, shares those freeway cams.

Fiction is the time-honored best way to let oneself off the hook.  If you want license to imagine and project, unfettered by facts, choose fiction.

However, lets not focus exclusively on unpleasant or unhappy memories.  The ability to fill in or render, when necessary, is what the imagination is all about.

We may develop our skills, as a TV and film critic, questioning a director's choices, and yet never critique our own onboard programming systems.

Do you believe everything you see projected, in front of your own mind's eye?

Still in Plato's cave are we?

In my quest to self improve, I'll turn a critical eye on my own imagination, letting my editorializing eye know that it itself is being supervised.

The old game, of observing the observer, like a dog chasing its own tail, actually yields positive results if engaged in with gusto and a healthy attitude.  A system is more likely to register improvements when under sincere scrutiny.

Summer School Update (OCN)

You might have thought I'd be a Blender user well before now. 3D Graphics is expensive, in terms of hardware and I haven't had the budget, is part of it. I do single frame (still) renderings and run those together. Blender does the same thing. I was using POV-Ray (povray.org).

Anyway, our paths crossed (Blender's and mine) in June of 2020 and I immediately fleshed out School of Tomorrow (a repo on Github for one thing) to include Blender, as both a front and back end.

There's a Part 2 to this one.