Miraz Jordan

Thanks to @Danielpunkass and @Manton for the kind words about me in Core Intuition 557:

…talk about Micro.camp …summarize some of the planned talks, and weight the pros and cons of … an all-online event.

I don’t feel any pressure at all…

Micro Camp Presenter Topics.

@bitdepth   @annahavron   @mandaris

Apparently New Zealand Sign Language week finishes today. While I’m very interested in language and have learned various amounts of several I’ve never tackled Sign. I need to remedy that.

Meanwhile, here’s a start: My Name is Miraz.

Same old stories:

The truth is that women are perennially and perpetually angry about male violence, but every time there’s a public explosion of that anger the news media will report it as if no one had ever noticed the problem before (it’s called “news” for a reason: amnesia is in its DNA).

Heh, this came up today on my daily check of my blog’s Surprise me page: Kea gyms!. Next weekend find out why that’s a bit of random serendipity…

Two — almost 3 — a.m. I seem to have mislaid my sleep…

This morning we had the first frost of the season, and there was snow on the high tops of the Tararua range too. Winter is nearby.

We have some mega rich people in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a heap of folks who depend on food banks and the like to scrape out a hard existence.

So some of the wealthy want changes to tax laws, but the government doesn’t seem inclined to really make our society more equal.

I think it’s up to the government to make real social change, but here’s my utopian idea for one strategy rich folks could implement.

Sponsor a school

Make low-decile (ie poor) schools the hub of a community. Adopt a school. Pay for free healthy breakfasts, lunches and snacks for all kids at the school. Create a free ‘health clinic’ for the school where all kids get regular health checks, eye tests, hearing tests, dental treatment, with free glasses, hearing aids, treatment. Pay for books and uniforms and computers and field trips etc.

How much would that cost? No idea. But if you have a billion dollars or even multi millions of dollars I reckon you could afford to sponsor a school.

Would that be unfair to other kids not at that school? Sure, but when has helping one person ever meant you have to help every person on the planet?

Good news story out of NZ today — 8 year old Josh asked the local Council for a swing for his friend in a wheelchair.

There were about 20 Kawau | Pied Shags at the edge of the sea today. And 20 more nearby but out of shot.

The sea was moving in with some energy.

Oops, I stumbled across the 2023 Eurovision Semi-Final 1 and thought I’d have it in the background while doing whatever else. Instead I’m hooked, watching it…

Enjoying (quite a lot of) the music. 🎶

And then there’s this: Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” Performed by Kerry Washington

This poem, and video, is so powerful: AI, Ain’t I A Woman? - Joy Buolamwini.

a spoken word piece that highlights the ways in which artificial intelligence can misinterpret the images of iconic black women: Oprah, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Shirley Chisholm

We had an old iPhone 5 with a dead battery. The phone’s so cute I wanted to keep it and use it as a radio. With a new battery and toolkit (NZ$20), and the help of an excellent video, it took me 10 minutes to install the battery. 5 minutes were spent putting back 2 pinhead sized screws.

In 1963 our family moved from England to Aotearoa New Zealand. Back in London our phone number was like this: CROWN42. That’s fake, just to be on the safe side, but yes, it had a word and numbers.

So when an online service years ago had me set up challenge questions, and before the days when I was smart enough to make up random answers*, a challenge that asked for my first phone number was answered with CROWN42.

Then today I was challenged on login, and the challenge form told me to enter numbers only. I duly entered 42 and was rejected! I tried again. Same result (funnily enough), with 3 tries remaining…

In the end I entered CROWN42 and achieved login.

So, there’s something wrong in that system. The creator of the challenge didn’t know that phone numbers could contain letters. The system allowed me to enter letters — both in setup and then in the form that claimed I should only enter numbers.

• These days I’m so much smarter when setting up challenge questions: they ask for mother’s maiden name so I enter something made up on the spur of the moment like blueberriestastegood. Then I make sure to record these questions and random answers somewhere safe.

Covid booster finally achieved 👍

Why we perceive ourselves negatively as we age:

As we get older … there is a subtle decline in memory, but we overstate it… older people blaming every memory failure they experience on their age is a symptom of ageism… Everyone has memory failures, but … as we get older we blame it on our age.