Solipsism Gradient

This flower measures about 5 mm across and seems to be pretty typical for the Jequitinhonha region.

It was very windy so I had to hold the stem with my other hand and set the shutter speed to 1/2000 sec. This also had the desired result of blurring the background.

Here [in following posts] are the promised pictures – or at least, the better ones , from my New Year’s vacation at Milho Verde, near the source of the Jequitinhonha River in the interior of Minas Gerais.

Dori Smith and Tom Negrino’s Backup Brain pointed me at Kari Coleman’s article “My Psychic Adventure”. This is in the James Randi Educational Foundation Newsletter.

Worth reading; of course, people who really want to believe in this sort of thing won’t be dissuaded by logic.

From near the end:

I think I have finally found my answer to those people who tell me that skepticism takes the joy out of life, that you need God to experience morality, and that without him it’s just a heartless existence. People were happy to talk. They really just wanted someone to listen to their problems, or share their hopes and dreams. They wanted to go over funny stories about a loved one they’d lost or just sit and remember them out loud with someone. When I took away the voodoo, the fact that we had “shared” didn’t go away. There is all the joy you need in human interaction.

One of my favourite writers, William Gibson, now has a great blog up. Excellent reading. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link!

Gibson says:

I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.

He seems to be one of the few people who watch TV even less than I do… but if you substitute “writing and debugging code” in the quote above, I could have said it myself…

The MacIntosh Hotel in Manaus (Amazonas) was photographed by “Tereré com Tapioca”.

Bill Amend’s Foxtrot looks at rumors about the upcoming MacW… I mean, FruitWorld Expo.

We just got back from a week at the town of Milho Verde (population ~2000 or so), near the source of the Jequitinhonha River in the interior of Minas Gerais. This is about 350Km from where I live.

Photos will be posted next week. It was a very nice vacation, although I wouldn’t do this sort of thing often… you’ll see why. 😀

Anyway, the newly-opened tourist base had an old Pentium 133 with modem and I managed to log on a couple of times, after about an hour trying. The nearest Internet provider is about 150Km away and the @#$%^ modem insisted on connecting at 46 Kbps; using V.90 instead of dropping back to the older, more reliable V.34bis.

This being a Windows machine I didn’t manage to figure out where to change the modem script (or its equivalent). So it would connect, work for anywhere from zero to 5 minutes, and then stop working – without, however, dropping the connection. And, of course, there’s no configuration parameter for working at reduced speed…

Needless to say, the connection never stayed up long enough for me to post anything or reply to e-mail. Anyway, things are back to normal now.

Bruce Kushnick’s book, “The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells”, can now be downloaded for free from TeleTruth.

Thanks to David Weinberger’s Joho the Blog for the link!