[FRIAM] An Open Letter to Joe Biden

[steve smith]

Nick -

> God, Steve, am I 20 years older than you????  But you're so OLD1

I know man.

I have an 83 year old buddy who I share a huge number of strange 
coincidences with, but once we get into the "good old days" I find that 
I often wasn't born when he was already carousing hard.   His first car 
was a (rusted out, ratrod) 53 Corvette convertible, mine a 64 T-bird 
(T-boned)  we each paid $25 for our respectives... his maybe double 
mine's value given inflation... but he was traveling between Las Vegas 
NM and MIT when I was 3.   I was born months before Sputnik made it up 
and he was helping his father build a tuner circuit to tune in the 
Beep-Beep-Beep as it went overhead. We both bought and learned to fly 
the virtually identical antique airplane (47 Luscombe) as young men (he 
just out of a BS in Socorro, and me after my Sophomore year in Casa 
Grande AZ... we neither obtained a license, flying in and out of fields 
without towers and avoiding busy airspace...   or having a licensed 
pilot with us (he flew to MA and back... me not so far ranging).   But I 
was 6-7 years old, living not that far from where he was flapping his 
wings).

When I was a young man I used to brag that I was 43 when I was 17 as a 
virtue signal of my maturity... now those extra 16 years feel upon me, 
especially when reading your description of the room-crossing. But 
damned if I don't feel old... you and Frank are great examples, him with 
his tennis playing and sports-car racing.

I didn't have any hip infection but I recently gave up on my denial and 
let an X-Ray tech take some pictures of my hips which had been vexing me 
more and more for each of nearly 10 years. The radiologist joked, after 
seeing the condition of both of my ball-joints that "if you sit still 
for more than a few hours, this bone will fuse to that bone and you will 
never bend at the hip again".   The Ortho Surgeon I saw to invite to do 
highly invasive surgery to implant some cyber-parts said, "I didn't know 
they made ball-joints square like that"... sure enough, totally 
flattened on top, both of them.   Worst he'd ever seen?  He probably 
says that to all the old men.  He reminded me of Doogie Howser.  
Testimony to my ability to live in denial and/or make a virtue out of 
suffering.

I WAS holding out for when they could give me telescoping drywall stilts 
in place of legs, but the ortho said "nup, not anytime soon, if for no 
other reason than the time it takes to get such a thing through HIH 
regulations".   I *really* wanted a set of snap-on sockets so I could 
switch out the fancy runner-springs, or manatee class swim-tail, or the 
drywall stilts.  who *doesn't* want to be able to clean their gutters 
without a ladder and pick a penny off the floor without bending over?    
My Hypershell lower body exoskeleton has been delayed (Yay kickstarter) 
so I won't be finding out if *it* would have obviated the need to do 
this for a few more years (decades?) with a weight "offset" of 60 lbs 
specced (transfer from belt above hips to lower thigh above knee?), with 
(supposedly) adaptive gait control and hopefully "regenerative 
braking"... which is part of the delay (according to the company)...  it 
wasn't part of the original spec... but their recently launched 
competitor has it in their spec so... arms-race?

>
> i  am grateful for your kind words,  particularly coming from one of 
> the best noodlers in the business.

Glad to see/hear your noodler (i.e. the Dear Biden letter) is still 
working well...  My noodle is aleady atrophying under the 
(mis)augmentation of LLMs.   I can still wayfind with a map but any 
month now I may forget how to construct a sentence without help.   GPT 
keeps his/her/their sentences down to only one or two clauses or 
conditional phrases... maybe this is a good thing. Also eschews 
parentheticals and this/that/the-other superpositions.   Go GPT!

- Stave