Month: July 2023

Lazy Sunday: From Mangos to Economies.

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My mind is a bit cluttered. Sometimes I simply vegetate somewhere and blank it off, and sometimes I go through my mind, taking things out and examining them one by one. Sundays are good days for that.

It’s also sort of like a roundup. I have a thunderstorm playing on Youtube for ambience and the sun has crept up.

Mangoes

Maryanne posted about National Mango Day in the U.S. – and there were some interesting comments back and forth from Trinidad and Tobago, with Renard Moreau and myself representing Trinidad and Tobago in our own ways.

It really got me thinking about the different varieties of mango that I grew up with but don’t see much of anymore, even in the more rural areas. In the US, where I also understand the perspective at the market, a mango is just a mango. Growing up, though, this was not so.

I grew up with Greyham mangoes, large grafted mangoes that could count as an entire meal – even in the U.S. ‘Judy’ mangoes were about half the size. ‘Doo Doos’ mangoes were popular but I always found them annoyingly small – too much work for too little meat.

The Hog/Rose mangoes were for making mango chow – a recipe which is fairly basic that always varies a bit from person to person. Any recipe calling for chillis with the mango chow is not a mango chow recipe, I’m sorry. It could be a Thai dish, which is different, but growing up we had the scotch bonnets, the bird peppers (whose proper name I do not know) whose trees magically sprung where the birds dropped the post-digested seeds.

Anecdotally, the birds suffered a long time in Trinidad and Tobago when the government routinely sprayed malathion all over the place for mosquitoes. They have made a resurgence, all the different tanagers and thrushes and grieves, but the bird peppers never really seemed to come back. You can get them here and there, and I’m on the lookout.

‘Long’ mangoes were for cooking, for making mango talkari, as well as mango kuchela. In the ingredients for the video below, you’ll see the author specified ‘long’ mangoes, and verily, those are indeed long mangoes!

There were all these different types of mangoes, and when I listened to my elders when I was younger, they too would talk about mangoes that they could no longer get.

There are reasons some of these species don’t make it, but the main reason is because of humans. There was a time when everyone seemed to have access to a mango tree in Trinidad and Tobago, but because of people not cleaning under their trees or keeping them properly trimmed, the answer people came up with was to cut them down. Those were generally the generic rose/hog mangoes.

Then there’s the marketplace, where long mangoes and a few other species are bought en masse for foreign markets and for local companies to produce products. If you wanted to make money, having a rose/hog mango tree wasn’t of interest.

The mangoes that do make it to the American markets – not from Trinidad and Tobago, I think mainly from Mexico – have to travel well.

That lead me to a conversation I had with a Minister of Technology of St. Lucia over a Piton, circa 2005, as he explained the banana market issues that St. Lucia was having. I don’t know how it is now, but I’m fairly certain that St. Lucia’s exports are seeing severe competition from the larger land massed nations for the European markets. At the time it seemed they were being edged out, and I don’t know if they have been (yet?), but an island simply can’t compete with a nation that has much more land mass.

We like to throw around, ‘banana republic‘ a lot when we speak of some developing nations without understanding the history related to mainly Guatemala and Honduras. Even so, the banana is an interesting fruit because it needs us to propagate it, and what people see in the developing world as bananas are actually only one type of Musa. There are a thousand types of banana, but only a few are the ones that the developing nations are interested in.

I grew up knowing at least 10 types of banana in Trinidad and Tobago, now I only see maybe 2 varieties regularly. If one of you finds some ‘man-killer’ fig, I’m looking.

The then Minister told me about the color charts, the size charts, and that bananas that didn’t meet very specific criteria were thrown away, which by itself as a travesty. I remember noting the neatly kept graveyard across the road while we were drinking our Pitons and thinking what an odd coincidence that was.

What’s worse, if a supplier, like St. Lucia, didn’t meet it’s annual quota, the balance was carried over to the next year which meant that the supplier would have to produce even more bananas. Banana republic indeed. One bad year and it could mean a severe loss of income for many years as the Banana Republic plays ‘catch up’ to a quota they can’t make. Over one type of Musa.

That means more and more of the precious land on an island would be devoted to the monoculture of Musa. Why precious? Populations rarely stay the same, they have a tendency to grow because one of humanities recreational activities – indeed, the one that motivates so many things – is making more humans.

Thus, the biodiversity of an island can be wrecked even as the economy destabilizes. That’s why when people in Trinidad and Tobago say we should be growing more of our own food, even as the government takes arable land and builds houses on it, I wonder where they intend to find the land to do so. Yet the government in Trinidad and Tobago, about as archaic as the year the present Prime Minister was born (1949), doesn’t change much regardless of political party is in charge.

Jamaica had a similar incident related to coffee, where only the Constitution of Jamaica saved the land of Jamaica’s coffee farmers from being seized. I can’t find a link for it, but it was something discussed at the very table with the Minister for St. Lucia.

Growing monocultures of vegetables or fruits, a way to feed massive cities, wrecks rural areas, not unlike what coal did to the poorest regions of America.

I don’t expect you to watch the entire video here on the site, but it’s worth watching on YouTube and quite revealing.

We have a tendency to forget – and I include myself – where power comes from, where produce comes from, and how much it costs beyond economics. This is not to say that it can be done otherwise. ‘Organic farming’, as an example, requires a lot more land to produce the same amount of produce, and drug cartels are finding their own opportunities with avocados and limes.

What a strange world, where the paths to our continued stability could be the seeds of our own destruction. The bananas and mangoes must flow!

Is there anyone to blame? I don’t know that there is. We’re all born into a system, to press forward we have to work within the system, and then eventually we find faults with the systems.

Maybe we need new systems. I’m sure very smart people have had very smart meetings with lots of big words, but in the end… we want things from all over the world now. How many bananas can St. Lucia sell to balance it’s imports? How much coffee for Jamaica? Did we forget Haiti? France didn’t, that’s for sure.

I’m sure I’m not the first to wonder about this. I’m sure I won’t be the last.

There’s no call to action here, and I’m not saying anything is right or wrong. I’m just wondering what the future holds for people on both sides. Will there be banana riots in stores in the U.S. and Europe if not enough bananas are to be had? Will there be a Black Friday for avocados when the cartels withhold avocados? We see what’s happened with coal, with oil, and so on.

It’s almost too ridiculous to consider, but then I’ve been on the planet for more than 50 years and seen plenty of ridiculous. We are not that far removed from our cousins fighting over the best trees in the jungle.

It’s worth taking a few moments to think about over a cup of coffee. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions and I think we all should.

A Quick Note On Fungi.

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Fungi have a long history on our planet. We still don’t really understand them as well as we want to or should. They’ve even made their way into science fiction.

Quite a few people didn’t know that the Paul Stamets on Star Trek Discovery was named after the actual Paul Stamets, a mycologist and entrepeneur.

For the record, the mushrooms in this post are AI generated and so don’t believe that they are edible. I’m no mushroom expert.

Watching the BBC’s Earth 2023 today, in Episode 4, Chris Packham talked about the now extinct giant prototaxites that existed 360m-470m years ago. Up to 1 meter (3.25 ft) in diameter, and up to 8 meters (29 feet) tall, they dwarfed plant life for a time until plants took off and relegated the fungi to shadows. They were the tallest fungi ever, as far as we know.

Digging into it, I thought, “What if fungi could eat plastics?”. It ends up that some types of fungi can eat plastics, and the results are also edible.

I’d have thought that would have popped up in one of my feeds. What an amazing planet we live on.

I’d love to get some plastic eating fungi.

End of an Era: Kevin Mitnick

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Many people may not even know who Kevin Mitnick was, and it’s a little sad to note that because he was probably one of the most interesting characters in my lifetime to push back on technology even while pushing it. He certainly lived his life his way.

I do believe that he was the first person to be accused of being addicted to computers. He certainly was one of the most famous, if not the most famous.

…Mr. Mitnick was a heavyset and lonely boy who, by the age of 12, had figured out how to freely ride the bus using a $15 punch card and blank tickets fished from a dumpster. In high school he developed an obsession with the inner workings of the switches and circuits of telephone companies. He pulled pranks at a high level, managing to program the home phone of someone he did not like so that each time the line was answered, a recording asked for a deposit of 25 cents.

He showed a willingness to violate the law flagrantly, breaking into a Pacific Bell office as a teenager and stealing technical manuals.

In the late 1980s, he was convicted twice of hacking into corporate computer systems, leading to time in prison and counseling for addiction to computers…

Alex Traub, “Kevin Mitnick, Once the ‘Most Wanted Computer Outlaw,’ Dies at 59“, New York Times, July 20th, 2023.

He and I were not unlike each other in some ways, which is probably why I kept track of him over the years. I was never as notorious or famous, but there was a curious playfulness to him that I knew all too well as I had it too. My pranks, though, never got me tracked by the FBI, or got me put in prison because I didn’t really ever go beyond harmless pranks. Like him, too, I never did it for profit, either. I did it because I wanted to see if I knew the system, or to help me know a system, or to point out to those who should know better that their systems were flawed. Maybe, in that regard, we had some commonality.

That curious playfulness, I think, has a place in the world. I think he demonstrated both extremes of it at different points of his life, and I consider that a noteworthy contribution.

Lost Handshakes.

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Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago with a business phone in the house, I was taught how to answer the phone and later how to call people. We call it etiquette, and in the 1970s and 1980s, time spent on the phone was billed by the minute.

We didn’t waste time on the phone, but we also weren’t terse.

In information technology, this is a handshake, possibly one of the most important things to understand in the world of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). It’s checking to see if the communication is going to where it’s supposed to be going, and establishing that connection so that more information can go back and forth.

This seems to be becoming a lost art when it comes to phones.

Over the last decades, I’ve noticed an increase in people calling me from business places and asking to speak to me without telling me who they are. Their number is strange, I have no idea who they are, but they want to ask me if I’m there.

Clearly I’m not until they announce who they are.

In dealing with a pair of glasses recently, it came to the fore again. I was called repeatedly, and a little annoyingly, to tell me I was due for my annual test, and each time the person on the other end did not announce themselves and went straight to, “Hello, is _________ there?”. It’s a script, apparently, or it’s just crappy phone etiquette, so each and every time I say, “Let me check. May I ask who is calling?”

Had they announced who they were when they called, I wouldn’t have to ask. It takes less than 3 seconds. I don’t know who you are. Maybe I don’t want to talk to you if you’re selling me used underwear – I have enough, thank you very much, and I did just wash the set I do have.

It wouldn’t be so bad except I can hear the attitude shift when I ask, and explain I shouldn’t have to ask. You work for a company, you need to announce who you are. I am actually doing them a favor in correcting improper etiquette that wastes time of both parties.

Announce who you are, then ask if you’re calling the right number to get the right person to communicate whatever your message is.

Somewhere along the way, it seems ‘smart phones’ made for worse human communication in that way. It doesn’t seem like the Millenials and Gen Z and whatever comes next are too interested in learning this skill, but it’s an important skill.

Til the day I die, I’ll end up correcting these people, and they will hate calling me – which I think is balanced with the fact that I hate having to ask them who they are every time.

Island Oblivious.

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I wandered off to a coffee shop, a bit late since the person who I was going to meet today for coffee was sick and that skewed my morning a bit. I was heading there during ‘rush hour’, which is fine because the line is usually steady and people are in and out quickly.

Not this morning.

No, this morning there was a line because one of the two registers was being occupied by a befuddled elderly East Indian man, probably in his 60s with a bad hair dye job waiting for his wife – I think it was his wife – to get the prices for every single coffee cup they had on display.

Granted, one of my pet peeves is that in Trinidad and Tobago, it seems companies don’t understand putting prices on things makes things easier for everyone. But this woman, an East Indian with a light complexion and a Northern American accent – I suspect a forced version of Canadian – was being ridiculous, going back and forth to the shelf at what was clearly a busy time. Her white blouse highlighted the brown frames of her glasses and made the black hair dye look unnatural, her scowl a natural one that had been baked in with wrinkles.

I suspect husband and wife dyed their hair together, and I suspect that he may have been strapped down for it given his nature of just standing by and looking awkwardly at the line as the line stared at him.

She was completely oblivious to her surroundings and the people there, including her husband, which is why I did not have the AI generate what I suspect was a henpecked husband.

The baristas were trying to force the line through one register and were doing their utmost. One took my order, which was my regular order, as I advanced within hearing range of the odd oblivious dyed couple. They were ruining my rhythm. I did not like this.

I added, as they took my order and pseudonym for that shop, with a Marine Corps trained voice projection, “And I’d like to know the price of every coffee cup you have in the store too please.”

The baristas dutifully did their best to hide their laughs and smiles. The line, however, felt strongly about being quietly enraged by the horribly dyed twosome who had raised our ire. I did not. I waved my hand at the baristas, signifying that this is not what I truly wanted and they should ignore the request.

At the register now – they were still there, on the other register, finally making their way through the menu. It had been at least 15 minutes of rush hour, and during that time only 3 people had made it to the cashier because it was taking 2 baristas to deal with this woman’s incessant questions about the coffee cups.

I was the 4th. As I cashed out – it only took me a moment – I hear her saying, “Oh look they have dragon fruit!” and I looked over at her and laughed, simply shocked by how oblivious she was to the world around her. People were trying to get to work, she was wasting everyone’s time because a wild hair had impaled her posterior. She didn’t care about anyone but herself, and she was feeding the stereotype of well-off women in Trinidad. It was difficult not to hate her. I found solace in laughing at her.

She was laughable. She was so oblivious that I knew that the only thing she would understand was scornful laughter, so I laughed – and this broke her concentration. She looked at me, shocked. I said very quietly for her benefit alone, “People have other places to be and you’re the obstacle right now, you ninny.”

I’ve taken to calling people ninnies today. I don’t know why. It just rolls off the tongue.

She was still processing what I said when I walked off, awaiting my drink.

At this point, a new terror entered the lives of people in the coffee shop – one of the guys ahead of us felt the need to impress everyone with his loud phone call. He had a combination of dreadlocks combined with an undercut – I don’t know what you call it – and he was regaling everyone and the person he was yapping at with where he had done photoshoots.

Speaking for myself, I wish he had gone away to do a photoshoot instead of yapping away about them as we waited for our drinks. But again, oblivious to people around him, he yapped and yapped and yapped and yapped, projecting his voice with no reason.

I took to staring at him, since he clearly wanted attention, and this unsettled him, so he started walking around and trying to avoid my gaze as he yapped. Drinks were piling up on the counter, and he was still yapping. He finally picked up his drink and sat down – a drink that had been there for at least 4 minutes while he was trying hard to impress someone other than me.

Why are people so oblivious to those around them? When I get a call or have to speak on the phone, I don’t want to do it around people. I certainly don’t want to do it around people I don’t know.

It would be nice if all the oblivious people were stuffed onto an island where they could be rude to each other until some semblance of manners became sustainable among them.

Perhaps that’s where I live.

The Tourist.

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There is a world out there that we try to make sense of. As a species, we’ve done pretty well at making sense of a world that our forebears didn’t understand. Science has allowed us to understand our world a bit more with each generation.

Yet it doesn’t explain humanity. The Fumigator is one such example and there are many others out there if you pay attention. I view every time I leave my keyboard to do things required of me by my body (going to the store) or by society (going to a meeting), I see very strange behaviors.

They’re not always good or bad. And maybe it’s a bit of my own perception, a tourist to humanity not unlike Uncle Traveling Matt.

While I have never feared for my nose in that way, I do often think of people as ‘silly creatures’.

How often do you go into a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken to see someone at the head of a long line discussing what they want? They only sell chicken. All you have to do is tell them how much, and if you’re confounded by 5 sides, you likely should not have left your house.

People will stand up there at the front of the line, having had 10-15 minutes to decide what they want so that they can be models of efficiency and tell the cashier what they want. Confounded. Never mind that they want special pieces of the chicken. What should be a simple thing becomes complicated and impacts everyone else who likely wants to eat lunch at the same time.

Granted, I don’t eat at KFC, but I used to – too frequently. There was something about super-duper-omg-wow-saturated fats and creatinine levels involved, but that happened long ago and I’m fuzzy on the details.

The point is, 9 times out of 10 when I’m surrounded by humanity with all it’s oddities, I can’t help but feel like a sort of tourist – perhaps even an anthropologist – studying the habits of humans. I don’t need a plane ticket and an all inclusive deal.

I can just walk out of my door.

We are very weird creatures. We are, indeed, “Silly People”.

You might enjoy Three Profound Life Lessons from Milan Kundera That Alter Your Perception. It covers a lot about people-watching that people who appreciate this post might appreciate.

The Grey: Perception.

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I’ve managed to grow the goatee longer than I ever have been able to. The itchiness stopped me in the past, having me reaching for a razor, but this time I persevered.

In previous incarnations, It was all dark brown – the natural color of my hair. People didn’t react the same that they do now. My theory is that it’s mainly grey now, and that ‘softens’ it.

I don’t know that this is true. I have no one to ask about it, really. People who had seen it before, all dark, are dead. Those that did comment on the previous one said it was intimidating, and some even said that generally I had an intimidating look over the years.

I had one bartender in Queens say I looked at people like a cop. She was nice about it, she was an interesting character herself, a lesbian airplane mechanic missing a front tooth who was making an extra buck at a little bar I frequented.

I don’t know how people see me. I never really worried about how people see me. These days, though, it seems they are nicer since I grew the goatee, so I suppose I’ll keep it.

Clearly I didn’t have a topic today, so hey, the goatee was a good fall back.

Trapped In Our Own Weirdness.

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When I wrote about expanding our prisons, implicitly it’s about the removal of biases through education. For example, how can one who has even a passing understanding of the human genome still consider ‘race’ an issue? Here we are, having mapped the human genome, and we continue acting out over skin tones that have little to no correlation to genetics.

You can’t tell ‘race’ by a genetic test. Race is a label, and a poor one, and one we perpetuate despite knowing this.

It’s about history, like I pointed out over here when I mentioned the history of photographic film. It is a troublesome issue and one that we largely have reinforced by our own works that pass on from generation to generation.

At first it was just images, from the earliest cave drawings, then more formal writing and more elegant art, then recordings of all sorts. In today’s world we have so much that we record, and there’s a bit of wonder at how much maybe we shouldn’t be recording. These things get burned into the memory of our civilization through the power of databases, are propagated by the largest communication network ever built, and viewed by billions of people around the world independent of ‘race’ or culture but potentially interpreted at each point of the globe, by each individual, in different ways.

In an age of just oral tradition, it would just be a matter of changing something and waiting for living memory to forget it. Instead, we suffer the tyranny of our own history written by people who have their own perspectives. No one seems to go to the bathroom in history books or, for that matter, religious texts. An AI trained on religious texts alone would not understand why toilet paper has a market in some parts of the world, with a market for bidets in others.

Now we have the black boxes of artificial intelligence regurgitating things based on our history, biases and all, and it’s not just about what is put in, but the volume of what is put in.

The next few decades are going to be very, very weird.

More Writing Ambience.

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Generated by Inspirobot.me

I posted some writing ambience before, and today I’ll add to it after going through some stuff.

It honestly helps keep me on track. Maybe it’s the slight motion in the images on the television while I’m writing, maybe it’s the non-invasive sound…

Most likely it’s both. What I do sometimes is put it on a loop, too.

Now and then YouTube will do the, “Are you still watching?” query, which is mildly annoying, but it doesn’t seem to happen as much when it’s on a loop.

Honestly, it may be worth just downloading stuff like this to me.

Anyway, today, after posting about Teravibe, this one is Autumn Cozy who has quite a selection.

Two of my favorites are:

The Cozy Reading Nook

Honestly, I sometimes take a nap to that one too – nice white noise. Rain, I find relaxing.

Well, who doesn’t like a magical forest?

As I find more related to stuff I find helpful for writing ambience, I’ll make future posts. I still explore, and while I like the Space stuff sometimes, I also find it a bit distracting as well.

Expanding Our Prisons.

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Offhandedly, regarding something related to recommendations, I wrote, ‘there are always echo chambers’ in the context of social media and recommendations. It’s an unfortunate truth about we humans and our perspectives, and I thought to expand on it here.

We recursively play our roles in the Allegory of the Cave, where some of us ‘leave’ the cave and go explore outside of it. It was originally wrote about philosophers, but it also applies to any sort of world view.

You can think of this as when you’re a child and you leave the house and see wondrous things – so when you go back and report to your adult supervision, whoever that may be, you expect them to be as astounded as you were. They likely weren’t, thought they may have pretended to be, because you had just ventured out of a cave that they had already ventured out of.

Decorate as we wish

Conversely, adult supervision people tend to have rules you may not have understood as a child, such as, “Don’t climb trees” because they are more aware than the child of what happens when one falls out of a tree. The child, in the cave, doesn’t understand this rule, and so goes out and climbs trees, much to the consternation of the adult supervision.

Some children, though, do not wish to explore outside of the ‘cave’, and we consider these children well behaved and then later as adults find fault with them because they seem close-minded. This isn’t always the case, obviously, but it’s an example.

A child who has climbed a tree and looked down is more likely to understand the gravity of the situation than a child who has not.

If we go visit the Marginalian’s post, “The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality“, we begin to understand how this concept of the ‘cave’ can shape our reality. I do recommend the book mentioned, “The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality“, as it drills down deeper into how we experience our world.

Our brains ‘fill in the blanks’ based on previous experience. If we don’t have previous experience on something, our thinking is more confined when observing. If we have experience with something, we’re more likely to fill in any blanks more appropriately. This is why a senior person is supposed to be more valuable than a junior person in any given field because the senior person would have more experience, and thus be more familiar with situations that arise.

Fundamentally, this same concept is related to Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘10,000 hours’, which he consistently mentioned in his book Outliers. Of course, the 10,000 seems an arbitrary number when it comes to experience, but the point remains that the more you practice something, and the better you practice something, the better you become at it.

This is because you have gained experience that you did not have before. You have grown. Your mind predicts better now, we hope. If you practice the wrong things or practice ‘wrong’, you’re more likely to be more wrong – which gives us practiced idiots. Check your local newspaper for details.

In essence, the more experience you gain, the larger your ‘cave’ becomes. You might specialize in one direction, as many people do through education, or maybe you’ll push on the barriers on any side that catches your interest – which is where I’ll introduce David Epstein’s book, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World“.

…Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World“, David Epstein (2019), p290.

Because we do live in a world where specialization is what is taught – perhaps even forced – on students and employees, breadth of experience is more valuable than people think. I solved one problem for a startup with a memory leak by idly considering how mailing addresses are done in Costa Rica, which I had picked up in my travels. When it comes to software engineering, I applied all sorts of different experience I had gathered in my life to solve problems in ways that puzzled more than a few people in how I came up with them.

We are all prisoners here. Some go through school, get piece of paper and stop trying to expand the prison – the rare ones are the ones who keep learning, keep pushing their prison walls to give themselves more and more space, to give themselves more and more experience – because life, as it happens, is just a fleeting thing where our perceptions of our world grow only as much as we do.

The difference between education and learning is that education tends toward specialization these days. The world itself is not specialized and offers us the opportunity to grow beyond.

Grow. Push those walls back, expand your caves, your echo chambers, your prisons of perception.