The oldest companies ...

Fascinating piece on the oldest companies in the world, 

some of which were on the dark side of things without question..

At a time when the average company on the S&P 500 only survives for two decades, it’s surprising to see that there are companies that have existed for centuries around the world. The oldest company still operating today is in Japan. It’s a construction firm called Kongo Gumi that dates to 578 and has specialized in building temples for 14 centuries. Today, though the company has been bought by a construction conglomerate, temples still account for 80% of its business.

Read the Fast Company piece to learn more as yours truly certainty has. :)

Thru the Looking Glass - Fragile vs. Robust ... A tiny sample :)

Through the Looking Glass - Fragile vs Robust

A tiny sample :)

Nature: Small periodic fires, started by lightning, clears away dead brush to permit new growth. Robust
Man: By trying to prevent fires of any kind insures the build-up of dead brush to biblical proportions, thus generating the distinct possibility of creating fires unable to be controlled. Channel CA in 2019. Fragile  

To assume is to err. Fragile

Monoculture farming vs 3 sisters.
Monoculture farming depletes soil and encourages insect pests. If a virus hits a monoculture garden, catastrophe ensues. Monsanto and its Bt gene fortified corn, designed to ward off the corn borer beetle, has failed as the beetle adapted. What does Monsanto do now besides enforcing patents on an increasingly compromised product? Fragile

The 3 sisters garden 
By the time European settlers arrived in America in the early 1600s, the Iroquois had been growing the “three sisters” for over three centuries. The vegetable trio sustained the Native Americans both physically and spiritually. In legend, the plants were a gift from the gods, always to be grown together, eaten together, and celebrated together. As older sisters often do, the corn offers the beans needed support. The beans, the giving sister, pull nitrogen from the air and bring it to the soil for the benefit of all three. As the beans grow through the tangle of squash vines and wind their way up the cornstalks into the sunlight, they hold the sisters close together. The large leaves of the sprawling squash protect the threesome by creating living mulch that shades the soil, keeping it cool and moist and preventing weeds. The prickly squash leaves also keep away raccoons and other pests, which don’t like to step on them. Together, the three sisters provide both sustainable soil fertility as well as a healthy diet. Perfection! Robust

The net, a chaotic, voluntary system based on open standards and redundancy, works. Robust

But there’s a problem. Like a road network, the Internet has its own highways and intersections that consist of cables and routers. The navigation system that manages the flow of data around the network is called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). When you visit a website, BGP determines the best path through which the site’s data are to be transmitted to your device thanks to the redundancy of the web. It’s the shortest route solution It works well but ... BGP was designed only to be a temporary fix, a “good enough” solution when the Internet was rapidly growing in the late 1980s. If BGP is compromised, the web stops. i.e., Denial Of Services (DOS) Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.[1] Man in the middle (MITM) In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating with each other. Black holing In networking, black holes refer to places in the network where incoming or outgoing traffic is silently discarded (or “dropped”), without informing the source that the data did not reach its intended recipient. The black holes themselves are invisible, and can only be detected by monitoring the lost traffic.  Fragile

The supply chain driving the inherently complex production and distribution of smartphones must overcome numerous events able to disrupt the system in a myriad of ways including War, revolution, disease, weather, material shortages, manufacturing issues, truck breakdowns, traffic accidents, container ship mishaps, piracy, etc, etc, etc. Fragile.

Scientific experiments are inherently fragile in order to parse out the inner workings of nature. Discovering the constituent colors in light/Newton, The double-slit experiment/Young and Michelson & Morley accurately determining the speed of light. 

Keeping a teeter-totter perfectly balanced is hard as we all know. Fragile 

When a currency never varies, a slight change makes people crazy. Fragile 

Voltaire - Political systems equipped with periodic assassination gives rise to systems that renew themselves. Robust

Think the ossified 2 party system in the US as it’s always the same two parties without term limits. The system is paralyzed in its inability to improve. This ties in with lobbyists, the MIC, HC, Education and the continued subsidies given to big oil and pharma. Dems over-regulate, the Repugs, under-regulate Fragile

The Athenians selected assemblies by lot. Robust

Top-down political systems are also not robust. Think dictators. Heavy-handed control gives rise to possible rebellion as said systems cannot adapt to the vagaries of society or reality in the long term unless you have the occasional assassination.  The French Revolution happened because the royals couldn’t meet the needs of the bourgeois. Fragile

Extreme and needless complexity defines the medical industry. Ditto government bureaucracy. Fragile

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished and ... she always finds a way. Robust

Computer tech, requiring power to run, is incredibly complex and ... its data, stored as magnetic 0s & 1s on hard drives and SSDs (Solid State Memory), digitally decays within 30 years.  If one bit is wrong, the program won’t work. Fragile

Acid-free fine paper, requiring no power to run, lasts over a thousand years. Think illuminated manuscripts.

Religion, a system designed to be obeyed. Fragile Science, a system designed to be disproved. Robust

Forecasting of any kind is a guesstimate at best. Think Microsoft regarding the rise of the net. Fragile

Modern civilization, due to its extreme complexity, is fragile to the max.

Pequot Library Blues

Mark Naftalin & Friends aka Marco Naftalini e amici make the scene at the Pequot Midwinter Library Book Sale playing acoustic blues the right way. Enjoy.

The Founding Fathers, Live! :)

American Pie has a new meaning for us all. Thanks Richard for turning me onto this gem. :)

Ephemerality

Snowstorms like the one depicted in this clip are ephemeral. They last but a day as wind blows off the heavy dusting in just a matter of hours. As per this kind of storm, full moons also last but a day. Enjoy.

A force to be reckoned with ...

The man does not quit. Irascible, smart and above all else, tough and consistent, Bernie's a force to be reckoned with without question.

To whit ...

“He’s what a politician is supposed to be,” Donald McCullough, 55, a long-haired restaurant staffer and graphic designer, told me over the sounds of an all-woman rock band called Bad Larrys—this evening’s opening act of Sanders’ increasingly concertlike rallies. “Politicians are supposed to be working for us.”

“A candidate who will fight for the working class,” said Mike Bizier, 27. “A candidate who has been consistent for 50 years.”

Exactly.

65+ Knots Video

65+ Knots was the wind speed on CT's Fairfield Beach on 2/7/20, a velocity almost knocking yours truly down while taping this short clip. Enjoy the noise, the water and of course the sky as nature shows, in no uncertain terms, who's boss on planet earth. :)

Perpetual motion ...

Earth is heating up. Which means ... her ocean currents are running faster due to global warming.

To whit

Winds over the ocean have been picking up at a rate of 1.9% per decade, the researchers found. This increase in wind speed transfers energy to the ocean’s surface, and subsequently, deeper waters. About 76% of the upper 6,560 feet (2,000 m) of the oceans have seen an increase in kinetic energy since the 1990s. Overall, ocean current speeds have crept up about 5% per decade since the early 1990s, the study found.

What changes this will make, nobody knows.

In the pursuit of "perfection".

You know we're under surveillance 24/7, right? After reading Snowden and Binney, it takes a fool to not realize this is so, especially after reading how "perfect" government surveillance truly is using GPS data purloined from the smartphone residing in your pocket.

To whit ...

“When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” wrote John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, in a 2018 ruling that prevented the government from obtaining location data from cellphone towers without a warrant.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the decision, Carpenter v. United States.

With that judicial intent in mind, it is alarming to read a new report in The Wall Street Journal that found the Trump administration “has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement.”

The data used by the government comes not from the phone companies but from a location data company, one of many that are quietly and relentlessly collecting the precise movements of all smartphone-owning Americans through their phone apps.

Many apps — weather apps or coupon apps, for instance — gather and record location data without users’ understanding what the code is up to. That data can then be sold to third party buyers including, apparently, the government.

Remember, it's all about the money. Always has been, always will be. - Robert E.

60+ Knots ...

60+ pix 1

60+ Pano

60+ pix 2

60+ pix 3/feeding frenzy