Jonathan Cannon @OldYogre@writing.exchange

I distinguish between judging philosophies and practices and judging institutions. You judge institutions by the people shaping the institution, and by institutional results. Often these are not the best people, and often these are not the results that members of the institution even want to produce. But that is how institutions should be judged.

Continuing:
He now regrets never having turned to his mentor and saying directly that he should practice the same standards he preached before dismissing spirituality out of hand. "There are many charlatans, there are various people saying all kinds of things--completely stupid, cheapening it all but that's not what you judge it by," says Ashtekar.

"Chandra had told me that when it comes to scientific fields, you should judge them by the work of the best people, not by the work of the mediocre people," explains Ashtekar.
From Big Band in a Little Room, p. 53 by Zeeya Merali

I started carving this frame 17 or 18 years ago. A marriage and 4 children later I can finally give it to my parents this Christmas 🎄⛄ I'm inordinately proud.

When I look up close, I see the repaired, reshingled, weather protected porch roof, and the scraped, patched, and repainted pillars, but I also see the unpainted, unscraped, unrepaired parts that will take many more hours.

When I stand back, I see the beautifully redone shingles and the glowing white columns. Three cheers for perspective!

Fresh tomatoes from our garden. We're picking more now than in July. 😂

3yo sold me these rocks for 20 of the digital currency that my 12yo started minting this week. 😁

We picked 70 lbs of peaches on Thursday. I processed half of them over the last 3 days. I just told my wife I'm exhausted, and the rest aren't getting processed until Sunday. She said, I think you mean Monday or Tuesday. I couldn't decide whether to laugh hysterically or cry. 🥵

One of my favorite podcasts (Hidden Brain) interviewing one of my favorite thinkers (Daniel Kahnemann sp?). Just like judges don't like to turn decisions over to algorithms even if it would make their work better, teachers don't either. If we did, as a group, we science teachers, at least, would figure out the best research and embrace it rather than continuing so hard with old, status quo approaches.

Check out this Podcast: Our Noisy Minds https://player.fm/1BHGzCN

Someone mixed up am and pm when they set the clock on the emergency siren system in our small town. The monthly test just went off. 🤣

I love a decent phone camera. This is an image of the neon spectrum from the lab I ran today. So easy now to capture what was so hard or specialized just decades ago.

The remains.

Made a quick meal from odds and ends. My kids want me to remember the recipe:

Mashed potatoes, salt, butter, sour cream, milk to taste and texture preference.

Brown and cut bite sized pieces of Andouille (sp?) sausage and chicken.

Add ~16 oz crushed tomatoes (pretty thick), 16 oz water, and 3-4 tsp Better than Bouillon.

Simmer.

Salt and pepper to taste. 2 Tbsp brown sugar (optional).

Various frozen veggies. Simmer more.

Recommend mixing the two parts on your plate or bowl.

One year ago this was a vacant old house. It burned, someone cleared the lot and leveled the dirt. It looks like they threw some seeds on it. Now we have this. I'm still amazed how fast things grow in Georgia.

I'm inordinately proud of how all the imperfections in construction, hanging, and painting make this door I made so much like the rest of the doors in our 100 yo house. 😁

I had to fix typos because my screen was blurry.

Watching "Unorthodox" on Netflix. In the fourth episode, the main character starts starts singing one of the songs of the community she lost, and I was in tears. I have no idea what the song was about, but I do know how it feels to sing the songs of the community I have lost.

Making a custom door for our old house. It's not pretty, but I think it will be once it's covered with white paint to hide the flaws and match the house. And the glass panels and hardware will look good.

We have thousands of these obscure cellophane bees in our yard every March. They make little, mounded holes everywhere. This year I've seen bee flies whose larva feed on the bee grubs.

I'm trying to figure out a platform for creating open educational resource chemistry assessment questions. I want professors to be able to import and export the questions created with different learning management systems with all the learning technology and question test interoperability standards. So far, I can use D2L (supported by my school) with a clunky GUI editor. I'd love to enter LaTeX formulas with the mhchem package, but I can't find a platform I can access that has it integrated.