[FRIAM] An Open Letter to Joe Biden
Prof David West
profwest at fastmail.fm
Thu Jul 4 17:44:41 EDT 2024
movie RED (retired and extremely dangerous) old guys and gal get best of young whippersnappers. also sequel.
davew
On Thu, Jul 4, 2024, at 3:31 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> The talk about old age reminds me of the novel "Old man's war" from John Scalzi where a couple of old men and women after retirement join an international space force to protect interplanetary colonists from aliens.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man's_War
>
>
> Old age is no guarantee for an incapacity to work: Konrad Adenauer, the first German chancellor after WWII, was elected at the age of 73 and stepped back after 14 years in office when he was 87. He lived 91 years. Clint Eastwood is already 94 and still making new movies.
>
>
>
> -J.
>
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
> Date: 7/4/24 6:03 AM (GMT+01:00)
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] An Open Letter to Joe Biden
>
> 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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