[FRIAM] An Open Letter to Joe Biden

Fri Jul 5 00:49:12 EDT 2024

Bruce Willis was in that.  Real life was a little more real.

On Jul 4, 2024, at 2:37 PM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

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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