[FRIAM] An Open Letter to Joe Biden

[Nicholas Thompson]

Aw, Steve .   Get those hips done!  I waited to long to do mine.

NIck

On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 12:02 AM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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