Packing

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Screen Shot 2016-05-16 at 11.22.26 AMAn acquaintance is a firearms instructor and holds classes for those who want to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Attending one of these is a requirement in Missouri although it sounds like that might change. The state legislature passed a bill making such training unnecessary. Or so I’ve been told.

I don’t own a sidearm and have no interest in carrying one, concealed or otherwise, but I attended the morning session of one of these yesterday. We saw two hour-long videos by a self-defense attorney in Kansas City. The first hour explained the Missouri statute on concealed carry, and the second hour was about self defense laws in general and Missouri’s “castle defense” in particular. The attorney did an excellent job of making some complex shit mostly understandable.

Frankly, I was amazed that anyone would still want to carry a gun after watching the videos. I came away convinced that most people are far more likely to spend time in jail for misusing a firearm than successfully defending their home or person. But that’s just an opinion.

The afternoon session (I didn’t stay) was spent on the firing range. If I understood correctly, to get a permit you had to be able to put X number of shots into a target from a certain range. Most folks succeed I think.

Couple of takeaways. One, in Cole County, Missouri (where I live) the local sheriff processes 17 applications a day for concealed carry permits. Some of those are renewals but if only half are new permits that’s what… 2,000 a year? My other takeaway came when during the morning break when about 15 of the 20 people in attendance stepped outside to suck down a couple of cigarettes. Since most of these folks were getting permits to carry a gun so they could protect themselves, I found it strange they were not fearful of lung cancer.

All and all, it was an interesting morning and I came away with a slightly better understanding of the concealed carry mindset.

Phone calls

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Penang Pay PhoneI’m not certain I could easily make a long-distance phone call if I lost my mobile phone. It probably wouldn’t be difficult to find someone who would lend me their phone but I’m not sure I could remember any numbers to call. (I wrote a few down and put them in my wallet)

When I did most of my road work (80s and early 90s) every phone call on the road was made from a pay phone (usually a Hardee’s or Casey’s for me).

We had a toll-free number to call the home office and they gave us Sprint phone cards for all other calls. As I recall, I had to dial a ten digit number to get into the Sprint system; then my calling card number; and then the number of the person or business I was calling. What’s that, 30 numbers? Not a big deal because we all had those first twenty numbers memorized.

For personal calls from the road, I think I could call a number and then have the call billed to my home phone number (something I no longer have). So placing a “collect call” is no longer an option.

All of which serves to remind me how dependent I have become on my mobile phone.

Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

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Interview with Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.

“Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.” — Physicist John Wheeler

A finite amount of attention

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“Perceptual Load Theory states that we have a finite amount of attention and that once that capacity is maxed out, we cannot process anything else. To test whether paying attention to radio traffic reports can be bad for our driving, Gillian Murphy asked 36 people to drive a route in a full-sized driving simulator while listening to a traffic update on the radio.”

Listening to the radio could impair drivers’ concentration

GIF

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coffee-donuts

I still think of these as “animated GIFs” even the accepted terms these days is simply, GIFs. I find most of these annoying but once in a while I come across some I like.