John Boyd Thacher State Park, is situated along the Helderberg Escarpment, one of the richest fossil-bearing formations in the world. Even as it safeguards six miles of limestone cliff-face, rock-strewn slopes, woodland and open fields, the park provides a marvelous panorama of the Hudson-Mohawk Valleys and the Adirondack and Green Mountains. The park has volleyball courts, playgrounds, ball fields and numerous picnic areas with nine reservable shelters. Interpretive programs are offered year-round, including guided tours of the famous Indian Ladder Trail. There are over 25 additional miles of trails for summer hiking and mountain biking, and winter cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, hiking, and snowmobiling.
The SSD drive is for purposes of booting so much faster then a conventional drive — taking my laptop about 4 seconds to boot into Linux with the XFCE window manager compared to 30 plus seconds with the traditional drive.
Applications load somewhat faster, but the real speed difference is when you are preforming operations that are highly disk intensive, such as loading a large database or processing many digital elevation models at once. Obviously, CPU intensive applications aren’t improved by SSD, so if something involves more processing then loading, the benefits will be smaller.
All together though, I’m much happier with the speed of my machine with the SSD drive installed. It’s well worth the $150 to be able to start and shutdown the machine quickly, and have more access to my files. Plus, I still have the old hard drive in the DVD drive bay, so I have ample space on my laptop for years to come.
The Debian Package Manager turned 25 years old last year, and apt-get has been around for two decades now. I am old enough to remember manually installing packages using RPM and having to go around searching for dependencies.
And building a lot of software from source code using to ./configure; make; make install — and having to search around for packages to fix missing dependencies during the configure process. Good ol’ days of GNU Automake. It’s very rare these days to have to build something from source code, unless you are tweaking some of the lines of code.
I have always been very fascinated by the now quite old Richard Hofsteader essay. While his decades-old essay is mostly about the right-wing movements of the earlier centuries, paranoia is a central part of “fringe” politics. Sometimes it’s distrust of monied interests, sometimes it’s Hollywood or big business, sometimes it’s a distrust of a religious group, race or political party.
The Mayo Clinic defines paranoia as a “An unrealistic distrust of others or a feeling of being persecuted”.
If you look hard enough at any community, you are bound to find some people aren’t completely honest. There is a lot incentive to cut corners and we all develop cliques and have close connections that sometimes blind our objectivity. Sometimes there is outright corruption or criminal activity, but they tend to be a lot less frequent then the paranoid imagination would imagine. Most people don’t engage in criminal conspiracy, simply because of the risk to their own reputation and the fact that most institutions are built in ways to actively discourage criminal behavior by having audits and positive reinforcement for good behavior.
Out groups often don’t see that. People who believe the politicians are ignoring their wishes are likely to believe that the reason that representatives aren’t representing them is because they are somehow corrupt or evil. That’s ignoring the fact that politicians often have very active feelers on public opinion — elected officials read and study the newspapers and regularly conduct public opinion polling to ensure that they are acting in ways that the public wants. After all, if a politicians isn’t representing the public will, they are likely to get voted out of office, which means fired from their jobs. And most elected officials want to be loved, not hated by the public if only to stroke their egos.
Sometimes people just have ideas that are different then the majority’s view in their community. The farther you go out and up — the county, the state, the national level — the more diverse the electorate and the more likely to have a majority opinion different then your own in-group. Seeing one’s own political ideals ignored and snuffed out can be alienating, and lead people to search into the depths, looking for evidence that they have been defrauded and that their opponents are not playing honestly, using deceit and other illicit means to achieve their power and prominence.
Often I see paranoia being emphasized as a right-wing phenomenon, but if you look at many of environmental, labor, housing, and anti-war movement activists, you will see many of the same paranoid trends on the left. Some of it might just be rhetoric – often political rhetoric is more paranoid-sounding then actual belief. But you can’t look at the far-left activist and not hear many of the same conspiracy theories you hear on the right.
Are the fracking companies really working to poison your drinking water?
In 2016, spring came early with our first 81 degree day on Wednesday, March 9. It was an exceptionally warm day, the earliest 80 degree day on record. We got rain on Thursday but with temperatures in the low sixties, meant it just further melted the snow and kept the ground from getting too dried out. So what I do? I went out to Schoharie County to camp down at Betty Brook.
It was in the 40s to start out that Saturday, but got up to mid-60s by mid day. Lots of blue skies, although the grass was pretty day. I first started out the day at Franklinton Valie outside of Middleburgh.
I then went down to Mine Kill State Park on this most beautiful of early spring days.
It was wonderful camping down by Betty Brook.
A bit cool in the morning, but I brought my heater.
But by a few hours in the morning, after the time change, it was back up in the 60s. Not bad for March 13th.
The next day I hiked along the Old NY 30 at Max V Shaul State Park, aka Towpath Mountain Park.
After that I hiked Vromans Nose. It looked more like late April then early march this year.
Don’t you wish all mid-March days could be this nice?
One of the most important things for our next president is their job as the chief of law enforcement. The most important laws in our country regulate manufacturing, they ensure products we use every day are as safe, healthy, efficient and non polluting as possible. Regulations push industry to build better products, to innovate and to protect the public interest.
Some are pushing for radical changes in our country. I don’t believe in them. Instead, I think we should push industry to follow the law, and make incremental improvements as standards are increased to better protect the public as a whole.
