Author Archives: Steve Mays

Electric log splitter

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We don’t heat our home with firewood but Barb and I love a good fire. So I’ve been splitting logs for a lot of years. I used an axe until someone told me about splitting mauls. It’s hard work but good exercise (I told myself). But I’m done with the maul. Barb bought me an electric log splitter. She’s awful good about researching stuff like this and chose a very inexpensive splitter by WEN. At less than $300 it might be the cheapest electric log splitter sold. But set-up was simple and I was splitting logs in no time.

Took about an hour to split enough wood to last us the winter. We keep a rack on the deck and the rest in a big stack out back.

 

Waiting on my AI buddy

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I’d like to live long enough to have a chat with an AI that:

  • Has “read” my 5,700 blog posts
  • Has read my 4,000 Mastodon posts
  • Has watched/analyzed my 525 videos on YouTube
  • Has “read” the 858 books in my LibraryThing

Because there is no one who has or will get to know me that well. What would it be like to interact with an intelligence that “shares” those experiences? I cannot imagine.

Found photos

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Taken in the Peck’s backyard in Kennett, MO. Buddy Peck, Joanne Peck and Jan Miltenberger on the left; Pam Pylant and Alan Johnson in the middle; Barb and Steve getting frisky; Richard Peck looking at the eclipse.


This was taken after one of the sad little promotions at the radio station. A watermelon seed spitting contest, as I recall.

Time: Do past, present and future exist all at once?

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Near the end of the video there’s a reference to presentism and eternalism.

“Philosophical presentism is the view that neither the future nor the past exists. In some versions of presentism, the view is extended to timeless objects or ideas (such as numbers). According to presentism, events and entities that are wholly past or wholly future do not exist at all. Presentism contrasts with eternalism and the growing block theory of time, which hold that past events, like the Battle of Manzikert, and past entities, like Alexander the Great’s warhorse Bucephalus, really exist although not in the present. Eternalism extends to future events as well.” (Wikipedia)

Most of my reading (and many hours of meditation) makes me lean toward presentism. It’s always now. But –as suggested in the video– physicists insist the math argues for eternalism. And I’d kind of like for that to be “true” as well. Perhaps both can be true, depending on what time it is.