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This simple 5 bricks MOC is a RSS logo. Is anyone still using it? This old technology is becoming more popular again.
Have you ever had a problem that despite following cool LEGO blogs/MOCers on Instagram, Facebook, Flickr or any other social platform you don't see any posts from them?
Then RSS is for you!
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RSS Class 08 No.08480 with Europhoenix Class 37/6 No.37601 Perseus in the low level at Norwich on 4th September 2019.
RSS Class 08 No.08683 with classmate No.08480 top andtailing GA Mk3b DVT No.82143 into the low level at Norwich having run from Crown Point Depot on 4th September 2019.The 08's came off the DVT and DRS Class 37 No.37402 Stephen Middlemore was attached to work 5Z37 08:42 to Cardiff Canton departing 111 minutes late.
One of my first images created with the RRS 66F camera using Kodak Ektar 100 film and printed on Fujifilm Crystal Archive Glossy paper from my Pinhole in Beijing series.
I saw this phrase spray painted on the outside of a closed film photography store. I have walked down that street numerous times, but I have never seen the owner. I hope s/he is still in business. It says “There is no existence without records.” Perhaps it’s a take on “Je photographie donc je suis.”
2022 Reading List
•Top Fiction: The Periodic Table, Primo Levi; These are just such a lovely set of stories of life great (war) and small (little relations) mixed in with a very personal and practical view of chemistry.
•Top Non-Fiction: Science and Human Behavior, B.F. Skinner; Even though this is dated and abandoned by modern psychology I find myself referring to this book more than others as it is so relevant to modern issues of AI, A/B Testing, and social media.
•Top Business: Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson; I find this book persuasive on how financial malfeasance really does effect the real world we all have to live in.
www.icloud.com/pages/0de1rgmN8YVR0hCsqZWMdNPMg#rss-2022-r...
Full List
1.Being Ram Dass, Ram Dass; A history of the counterculture by one of its icons. The mix of psychology, Buhdism, and Hinduism is peculiar and western and deeply personal to Ram Dass. It gave me insights and context into many personalities that influenced my early life: Leary, Muktanada, Keasey, Sai Baba, and ZBS productions. I was disappointed in his reliance on miracles to explain is devotion to Mittenanda, but it did show what was best in the self actualization movement and how to end well.
2.How to Read a Book, Mortimer J Adler; This time I spent quite a bit of attention on the notion of meaning, truth, and tradition. I believe if you read for meaning then Truth must be important to you, otherwise it is just entertainment. “Terms” can only achieve meaning and work within a given tradition or literature. Not all traditions are equal, and believe that just as mathematics is an overly specific language, you can reason and find truth within a tradition, but you can assess the falsity of a tradition by comparing it to pragmatic concerns with the physical world. This brings up concerns with a post modernists view has real consequences for reasoning about the natural world.
3.Paradise Lost, John Milton; This is the story we all know of the Bible that isn’t in the Bible. The ultimate sin is “pride,” Satan is the serpent and the seducer, Eve is blonde, and Jesus is doubly a king (of heaven and earth). The book does show off its time, clearly responding to the Glorious Revolution and anti-Catholic in nature, not mention Satan’s use of canon.
4.Science and Human Behavior, B.F. Skinner; This book encourages a purely external black box view of human being with consciousness and cognition as unimportant characteristics. What is impressive is not the shortcoming of this technique found in the last 70 years (CBT, Neural Imaging, Deep-Learning) but the shear efficacy of the approach at predicting and controlling human behavior. His lessons on the failures of punishment, and the importance of distributed control structures have become increasingly important as behavior controlling power has become much more centralized through entertainment and advertising companies.
5.The Rise of Rome, Anthony Everett; I modern telling of Republican Rome, that always starts with the myth and then explains the confirmation and differences of modern scholarship, but keeps to the classical narrative of Rome as that is what drives its importance to us. The importance of civilian Militia to Rome and their obsession with order and ambivalence to Greece are well described, the section on Hannibal was very good to make some sense of Punic/Phonetian/Catheginian/Spanish all fit together as the semetic rival of Rome.
6.The Aeneid, Virgil, tr. Cecil Day-Lewis; A great epic poem that feels a bit like a Greek epic remix with so many of Ulysses and other Greek adventures revisited, but characters have so many more inner voices and are so much more psychologically modern.
7.Great Courses Aeneid, prof Elizabeth Vandiver; It was interesting the degree the book was meant to justify Augustus Caesar, from simple examples like the Trojan Games, to explain the war on Carthage, and to justify the importance of Piety/Duty. Also the idea that he mixes both the Odyssey and the Iliad in reverse order to bring those stories to a wider audience is fascinating, and how this is the only details extent of the Trojan Horse.
8.The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger; A surprisingly amusing journalistic book of how to write a story about a lost boat in which we don’t know what happened and the whole story is done by simile of the similar stories. The stories of modern fishing and how hard and brutal life can still be due to weather and the realities of the sea.
9.Children of Gebelawi, Naguib Mahfouz; A story that mostly uses ordinary people in a realistic violent patriarchy as metaphor for the Judo-Christian-Islamic tradition and by extension our modern world. The story creates an emotional understanding of the middle eastern cultures of what is both loved and hated within their own culture, but with a desire for freedom and fairness that externally we assume means independence.
10.A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism, Daniel A. Sjursen; An attempt at a 21st century Progressive’s history of the United States. It feels a bit awkward as it tells the story of America through its military conflicts, which doesn’t always align well with the important events for its oppressed peoples, also the book does not define nore justify concern about equity or hyper-capitalism. More complete than Zinn’s book but still not a stand-alone history and starts to feel journalistic starting with George Bush Jr. The pre-Bill of rights section is by far the best covering the complexities of colonial times and an unusually in-depth analysis of the Spanish American war. FDR and Russian apologist tendencies are mediocre.
11.Economics Facts and Fallacies, Thomas Sowell; Fairly basic economic analysis of tradeoffs and incentives, from a very conservative African American Economist. Generally well argued and very clear, though not always covering all the data. Not very persuasive on executive pay, excellent examples of the problems with statistical comparisons for economic development for wages, women, and blacks around non-comparable demographics age, education, marriage status. I agree with his analysis that the real problem with gender pay inequality is a problem with marriage and motherhood, I disagree that this is not a problem.
12.Arabian Nights and Days, Mafouz Naguib; A selection of 1001 nights stories, converted to a slightly more modern and real world and given specific moral meanings. The themes of the corruption of power from position, wealth, or invisibility caps is very present. The Sultan is ultimately creating corruption through his abuse of power, the book leaves unanswered to what degree we can ever achieve forgiveness for our sins.
13.The Koran, Mohamed tr. N.J. Dawood; A much more clear and prescriptive religious text than the bible. The retold stories include Adam and Satan, where Satan denies man's dominion over the earth, Moses where even clear miracles are denied, Jesus has a virgin mother but got has no son nor wife. Alms/Charity are always repeated ass is the care of orphans.
14.Cleopatra: A Biography, Michael Grant; Tries to tell the story from Cleopatra’s point of view, relying heavily on an optimistic strategic view of what could have been to her interest. In this story Cleopatra is the Hellenic Queen and represents the traditions of Alexander. She becomes a competent extension of the Tolomeis traditions working hard with vision and ruthlessness to maintain the power of her family within its own traditions. Relied surprisingly heavily on coin evidence and it was fun though not inherently convincing to mix in poetry through the ages to describe the possible scenes.
15.The Canterbury Tales, Geofrey Chaucer; Modern spelling and pronunciation, but original words. Was excellent storytelling, a collection of short stories that speak to each other as a series. Curious mixture of baudy and pious that feels surprisingly like Shakespeare (also the overlap of historic and classical themes). Many if not most of the stories are taken from other sources and are reset to give them a specific impact, that still resonates until today with the humor~ and lessons even if we moderns miss the stereotypes of the time.
16.Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff; This was a specific attempt at a positive view of Cleopatra as a competent ruler. The author correctly interprets that the primary stories we have have all been tainted by a conqueror who needed to have a villain to justify his war. Her arguments are convincing that Cleopatra was an active and judicious ruler working for her own self interest, she expanded her empire substantially, she reduced her own infighting, increased wealth and power though she eventually lost the entire kindgdom.
17.Immune, Philipp Dettmer; This is narrative biology, really optimized for kids to learn their first cellular system. It is up to date and current on the science but eliminates the biochemistry on the immune system, I learned about feedback loop of Macrophages/Neutrophil, Dendritic messengers, Lymphocyte (T&B) activation with silly analogies that are memorable.
18.The Bhagavad Gita, Traditional tr. Swami Swarupananda; It is interesting to read the raw text with its curious mixtures of things. I was most surprised by the mixing of caste called out as one of the obvious and greatest sins. I also found the mixing of the ideas that I am more familiar with from Chinese traditions such as the importance of duty (confucianism) and unattachment (buddhism). The lesson I took the most was the focus on accomplishment of duty without the aim for attaining Glory of the universe even if evil actions are taken, they can be forgiven if they follow the glorification of god. This produces a strong social structure without revenge and incrimination. This is a very un-Christian solution to the problem of Evil, as it always exists with us, and it exists without intent, but we can only overcome it (not individually) by maintaining society/duty.
19.A Short History of Artificial Intelligence, Michael Wooldridge; This books feels weak when compared to Mitchel’s AI book as it fails to really explain how different techniques work and covers a bit of the same history. This book is more in the history and makes it much more clear how much AI has always been part of mainstream software history, as the “Intelligence” has never been precise, the best insight of this book was the importance of computation complexity theory on the limits of AI, and why a combination of deep neural nets and monte-carlo strategies have only superficially solved the problem for some very deterministic cases like games. The second big insight was how much Brook’s strategy of interactive “intelligence” (roomba like) produces powerful results, but has no theoretical structure for progression.
20.The Sandman (01-75) & Audio Book, Neil Gaiman; Literary Horror, but still a comic book. The audiobook felt so much darker than the comic. It is a writers book, it is about the power of stories, both to create the gods and let them live on, the stories we create to punish ourselves (hell, furies) and the nightmares to guide us, and how end of each story is a little death that doesn’t
21.The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides tr. Benjamin Jowett; this almost feels like a modern history other than the unquoted speeches that are one the best parts of the book, the various rhetorical devices are masterworks. For Thucydides the war is a conflict between the slow alliance building oligarchs of Sparta and the mercurial imperialists of Athens. One offering honor and stability and other wealth and democracy. Nicias is my favorite General who doesn’t want to go to war but tries and fails. It feels a bit like a modern history book, and it is a great adventure story in its own right with detailed local politics with twisting alliances.
22.Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson; I do prefer the author's term secrecy jurisdiction s over Tax havens. It makes it clear it is a way to legally hide things from laws. Tax is lost which while that has negative consequences especially for the poor and weak it is side story from the evasion of legislation, and encouraging crime and corruption. The author's pro legislation, kaysien, labour movement opinions distract from how lack of rule of law hurt us all, even Delaware, Zürich, and the city of London.
23.Old Man's War Series (Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe’s Tale, The Human Division, The End of All Things), John Scalzi; The series has too much plot and not enough character or setting, it goes from super soldier, to frontier, to teenage team, to band of misfits save the world adventure stories. The world is a screed against sectionalism, and panegyric to individualism and the power of choice. The tension between these drives the relationships with the Aliens and development of human society.
24.Do Dice Play God, Ian Stewart; This is a book of practical mathematics, it focuses on statistics, unlike Taleb who really focuses on the meaning of uncertainty, this explains a difference between randomness (true incompressible information) and unpredictability (deterministic chaos). It goes well beyond the history of statistics and into dynamic equations and partial differential estimations and the how and why these techniques have been developed. Basically the practical side of the most advanced mathematics I studied. Stewart is determinist and makes an argument we should look for deterministic chaos in systems such as quantum.
25.Superior: the return of race science, Angela Saini; The book is a journalist look into biological racism's history, disproof, and revival. The author approaches the subject as a Briton of Indian decent, points out the two biggest proponents of eugenics we're the USA and Nazi Germany, how statistically there is more variation within any identified racial group than between any of them and how race consciousness especially in medicine combined with new national narratives is bringing back biological (scientific) racism.
26.Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowery; This is a very lyrical novel, that has great depth of character stuffed into 1 day and 1 hour a year later. The story is set with the tension of 1938 as an implicit background, and individuals whose horrible fate seems avoidable if they could just for a moment be something other than their ordinary selves. The Consul can observe and analyze the world in detail, but cannot make even simple choices in his anxiety and alcoholism, Yvonne has independently struck upon the same idea as the Consul to escape but cannot articulate it to him in his malaise to force it to reality, Hugh wants desperately to make his mark on the world, but always chooses the hopeless irrelevant path of history, when opportunity is so close but he cannot know. It leaves me thinking of how many decisions in our life are close to something that could make us better, but the default is to remain stuck where we are.
27.American Cartel, Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz; It is a two part story, starts with a crime novel and switches to an unfinished courtroom drama. I can almost sympathize with the manufacturers and distributors' claim that they are not responsible for prescribing or handing out the drugs, but the ‘71 controlled substance act gave the distributors the impossible task of regulating the distribution of what made them money. The story doesn’t explain why those groups went to Trump, but the ineffectiveness of the law to curb the distribution and death (even when doctors and pharmacists could be jailed), the revolving door of regulators and advisors, the lobbying to make it impossible to enforce the laws left many communities with nothing but anger and woe.
28.Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky; A primer on American leftist ideology, and a guidebook for Q-Anon. I did not know Chomsky’s past in the peace movement, or the American Communist party. Fundamentally he is an Anrcho-Syndicalist who has extreme faith in the ability of planners. He is very good at guiding a reader through institutional analysis, but as the book progresses he takes to much of the aims and institutions as responsibility for the outcomes. “they” must of planned it and made it happen. He is well read in history but provides a sometimes bizarre but not unsupportable view of facts, like people forced off farms into industry. His anti-Expert views, then demanding that aims can easily become results creates a perfect motte-bailey argument pattern for conspiracy theories, now popularized by the far right.
29.The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo; An ode to Medieval Paris, with a believable world with ridiculously over the top operatic characters and plot. Esmerelda and Frolio are both entirely corrupted by lust, there is no real redemption for Quasimodo who overcomes his position in society that believes that the soul must follow the body, leaving everything in tragedy. Even while maudlin over the top the details and dialog are fantastic, the philosophizing on architecture and poets is hilarious and insightful, I am left of thinking how the times and place make the man.
30.How Numbers Work, New Scientist; Fun superficial survey of modern mathematics, some little history like base10 and decimals moving from China to India to Europe, a very consise explanation ofhow set theory can ground numbers, cute applications of stats to the real world, the big names like Hilbert and Weil get little vignettes, the phycs and philosophy was just weak, casual read I recommend it to my kids
31.Proof: The Science of Booze, Adam Rogers; This was a fun book, mycology and biochemistry. The importance of the yeast, how the enzymes of malt work, good fun casual science read with a little bit of politics and history thrown in.
32.Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; re-read last time I read it I was in high school, and I barely remember it but it is fantastic, I would classify it more as a middle-age book than a coming of age book. It is deeply about the African American experience that still exists today, but that is used to show sharp relief of more general problems of how we find our place in society,. The anonymous author is invisible in many ways, the biggest is that he cannot be recognized for who he is, unlike the modern focus on identitarian politics. This focus is on how our history must effect us but we still desire freedom and recognition as individuals, not live other peoples dreams for them. I find the section on the inadequacy of the freedom of the duplicitous hipster Rinehart as inadequate, interesting and convincing.
33.Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson; This was an excellent biography that gives strong historical perspective and evaluates the existing controversies. Che comes out as an amazing leader through his passion for a fair society for socialist man Well done biography giving a sense of characters and balancing the historic controversies of the subject. I very much appreciated the level of context of the Americas in the ‘50s as a background setting. Che comes through as a quirky and unique individual, who provided leadership through strong conviction, and unflinching dedication to his ideals. The story is ultimately tragic, not due to the death and horror that he wrought, but how in life we can only learn one set of hard won lessons of loyalty and universally high standards for mankind that served Che so well in Cuba failed utterly in the Congo and Bolivia leading to his failure and death. His thesis of “Gorilla war as the crucible to forge the socialist man” is both true and inadequate. It was true as only extreme hardship could provide an environment to force people to work together wholeheartedly as one without conventions and institutions, but inadequate for creating a complete society.
34.The World According to Physics, Jim Al-Khalili; This a book about physics in 2020’s, it explains the 3 foundations of Relativity, Quantum, and Thermodynamics at their current state for the non-mathematical. I think the failure to address the dimensionality problems of Superstrings and the divide by 0 problems of merging Relativity and Quantum was sad even for a non-mathematical summary, but he does a great job of addressing the big problems of physics why unified theories are hard and desirable, why quantum is so important to the real world, the realists demands, why esoteric particles are so important to find, why holographic theory is important for cross-over from the large to the small.
35.The Periodic Table, Primo Levi; a beautiful collection of stories about life, work, the material world, growing up, and growing old. The background of his experience in concentration camp keeps the story somber, but his playful look at his youth and becoming a chemist, and making friends keeps the collection cheerful and insightful to human characters. Vanadium is such a short and concise look at many of the complexities of coming to terms with the ordinary horror of IG Farben employees and the inability to fully appreciate the enormity of the camps.
36.Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin; I was looking for ideas to improve underperforming teams, what I got was a refresher on the importance of deliberate practice: intentional, responsive, specific, and repeatable practice is what makes great performance. General skills/IQ allow people to get to a basic level fast, but does not speed up specific performance, also specific practice can even overcome much of the general failures of aging. The ability to apply this to teams was only through simile and didn‘t provide direct guidance. But is a good reminder of just how important intentionality is any result.
37.101 Wilderness Survival Skills, Kevin Estell; This was 80% covered in the old Boy Scout handbook, it reminded me of a set of skills that do make me feel more comfortable outside even if I rarely use them. I agree with the incredible nature of 550 paracord, but it is a bit more “survivalist” oriented than my relationship with the outside. It did make me think about emergency preparedness and the basic usefulness of knife, “cord”, and fire skills. I don’t really know how to teach fire skills to my kids in our modern low fire world.
38.Baltasar and Blimunda, José Saramago; The compelling plot is driven by the magical realism narrative and love of Baltasar and Blimunda, but the main thrust of the book is the condemnation of the church & monarchy failing to take care of the people and the great waste of wealth. The naive and omniscient across time narrator sets a sarcastic tone to the book to offset the saccharin love of the main characters, but their relationships with others are subtle and realistic: the monk, the music master, the sister, the father, and the workers are all beautiful vignettes.
39.The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, Andrew Doyle; A very contemporary work with an obnoxious beginning. The worst parts of the book are the complaints and examples of Woke aggression, the best part is the intellectual history of related topics and terms. I am unpersuaded that calling people their preferred pronouns is anything other than polite, but I do agree it should not be legally enforced, which leads to my strong sympathies with defense of Liberal Enlightenment ideology and primacy of reasoned argument as a method of social and material progress that must be defended and encouraged.
40.What I Didn’t Learn in Business School, Jay B. Barney; A fictional novel of management consultants as a pedagogical tool for business. It works OK, to explain the importance of real world experience to utilize NPV, 5-Forces, etc…, the need for diverse experiences to get at data, and the unrelenting importance of relationships and teamwork.
41.The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing; This is surprisingly readable, technically complicated book, the divisions into a writer’s versions of herself and multiple fictionalized versions of the characters lives, reactions and experience divided up by themes. The themes that left an impression on me were those of the communists and feminism. The focus on ideology that is supposed to be good but became corrupt echos of itself, self aware and embarrassed of its own failure. The relations between genders is deeply personal leaving open tradeoffs of independence and community, the social needs and expectations that come bundled in ways that even when the law allows cannot be taken apart leaving individuals unsatisfied. Watching the world the views of an empath who knows what everyone feels from the their body languages and is intellectual aware of how she is influenced by others but incapable of resisting was well portrayed.
Made this for fun to use on my blog:)
Basic sugar cookie with fondant.
Want to read more about cookies, cakes and decoration? Visit my cake blog www.cakejournal.com
The RSS Supreme, a Formidable-class stealth frigate docked at VivoCity Promenade during Navy@Vivo 2019.
This time, I do things right and think to measure it. Better picture tomorrow. Sorry that it looks somewhat tacked on, but I like the way that it looks personally.
I recommend going here for the story and other shots as they come out:
www.flickr.com/groups/the-shipyard/discuss/72157645807066...
Republic of Singapore Navy Formidable Class stealth frigate, RSS Intrepid, berthed at Vivo City for a community event.