semi-pointless weather post

After being kind of chilly * (high 40s - mid 50s F, 9-11 C) , lightly rainy, iron-grey, and all-round a normal January day for this part of the world yesterday, today I wake up and it is pleasantly warm (low 70s F, low 20s C) and partly cloudy. While I don't object to the warm temperature and lack of rain, it does make me worry a little. Obviously there can be unseasonable days in any part of the year, and it's normal for the weather to change gradually over a period of many years (thus the seasons seeming to be shifted later than I remember them being in my youth), but it seems to me that more and more, the weather patterns of the world are changing in ways that are... unbalanced, chaotic in the bad sense (and moreso than the weather already is based on chaos). I note metaphorge's comments about the temperature bouncing around by tens of degrees where he is lately, and besides being remarkable, it feels un-well somehow. It's similar to the way I wonder if the incidence of cancer really is greater and greater (rather than just an increase in diagnosis, especially versus medieval times), and if all the nuclear testing in the 40s and 50s changed the environment of the whole world in ways which are just now manifesting fully - if we fucked ourselves over without really being able to foresee that we could do so?

* - Well, in a relative sense. It's nothing to the kind of shitty weather that poor enotsola, shishain, kissspooky and others are dealing with right now.

[edit: fixed my temperatures. with only 45 minutes of consciousness when i posted this, i didn't notice the fact that the temperatures from the fahrenheit thermometer in the kitchen (which faces east and thus is falsely warm in the morning) and the celsius thermometer in my bedroom (which faces north and thus has a more accurate idea of the air temperature, at least) didn't correspond. i know about this temperature difference in a general sense, but i wasn't thinking. as i was preparing a sandwich for lunch it suddenly occurred to me that i had said that mid-70s F was less than 20 C, which is nonsense.]

semi-pointless weather post

After being kind of chilly * (high 40s - mid 50s F, 9-11 C) , lightly rainy, iron-grey, and all-round a normal January day for this part of the world yesterday, today I wake up and it is pleasantly warm (low 70s F, low 20s C) and partly cloudy. While I don't object to the warm temperature and lack of rain, it does make me worry a little. Obviously there can be unseasonable days in any part of the year, and it's normal for the weather to change gradually over a period of many years (thus the seasons seeming to be shifted later than I remember them being in my youth), but it seems to me that more and more, the weather patterns of the world are changing in ways that are... unbalanced, chaotic in the bad sense (and moreso than the weather already is based on chaos). I note metaphorge's comments about the temperature bouncing around by tens of degrees where he is lately, and besides being remarkable, it feels un-well somehow. It's similar to the way I wonder if the incidence of cancer really is greater and greater (rather than just an increase in diagnosis, especially versus medieval times), and if all the nuclear testing in the 40s and 50s changed the environment of the whole world in ways which are just now manifesting fully - if we fucked ourselves over without really being able to foresee that we could do so?

* - Well, in a relative sense. It's nothing to the kind of shitty weather that poor enotsola, shishain, kissspooky and others are dealing with right now.

[edit: fixed my temperatures. with only 45 minutes of consciousness when i posted this, i didn't notice the fact that the temperatures from the fahrenheit thermometer in the kitchen (which faces east and thus is falsely warm in the morning) and the celsius thermometer in my bedroom (which faces north and thus has a more accurate idea of the air temperature, at least) didn't correspond. i know about this temperature difference in a general sense, but i wasn't thinking. as i was preparing a sandwich for lunch it suddenly occurred to me that i had said that mid-70s F was less than 20 C, which is nonsense.]

Underworld Initiation

Relevant quote regarding "traditions" from The Underworld Initiation by RJ Stewart:

"A tradition is fuel for consciousness, causing it to blaze up, feeding it, and at the same time generating the light by which the consciousness illuminates the tradition. [...] Symbols should speak directly to the inner levels of awareness, and the soul should respond to these symbols."

Underworld Initiation

Relevant quote regarding "traditions" from The Underworld Initiation by RJ Stewart:

"A tradition is fuel for consciousness, causing it to blaze up, feeding it, and at the same time generating the light by which the consciousness illuminates the tradition. [...] Symbols should speak directly to the inner levels of awareness, and the soul should respond to these symbols."

career choices

This is glued together out of a bunch of stuff I just said in AIM to enotsola:

i have just been playing with numbers all day and my head is kinda bzzz with them. need to break from it, but i like finding out what statistics I can pull from things, and putting them together in various ways to see where they overlap. like, what i counted for Janice was how many items we check out total at all in a quarter, and what percentage was tapes, what was computers, what was other stuff, the idea being to prove that it's not crazy for us to have 20 student assistants on top of 3 full time staff. and then i thought hey, i can cross this with the VTEA enrollment and try to justify our existence to Workforce, by showing that it's likely that VTEA students taking one of X DLC classes are coming in to check out their tapes, thus they need us. and then i thought well, let's see how many students are checking out DLC tapes, and what percentage of our tapes DO get checked out at some point... etc. i am sure everyone is annoyed with my emails by now, but i find it fun in a warped kind of way. i should be a data analyst for a living, or something, because i would get to have 1) working with details, 2) finding connections, and 3) dealing with computers instead of people, all in one swell foop! i like finding out what stories i can make the numbers tell me.

(I don't mean this in the sense of warping statistics to prove whatever you want to prove. I mean it in the sense of seeing how much "real life" information I can possibly wring out of a given set of data.)

career choices

This is glued together out of a bunch of stuff I just said in AIM to enotsola:

i have just been playing with numbers all day and my head is kinda bzzz with them. need to break from it, but i like finding out what statistics I can pull from things, and putting them together in various ways to see where they overlap. like, what i counted for Janice was how many items we check out total at all in a quarter, and what percentage was tapes, what was computers, what was other stuff, the idea being to prove that it's not crazy for us to have 20 student assistants on top of 3 full time staff. and then i thought hey, i can cross this with the VTEA enrollment and try to justify our existence to Workforce, by showing that it's likely that VTEA students taking one of X DLC classes are coming in to check out their tapes, thus they need us. and then i thought well, let's see how many students are checking out DLC tapes, and what percentage of our tapes DO get checked out at some point... etc. i am sure everyone is annoyed with my emails by now, but i find it fun in a warped kind of way. i should be a data analyst for a living, or something, because i would get to have 1) working with details, 2) finding connections, and 3) dealing with computers instead of people, all in one swell foop! i like finding out what stories i can make the numbers tell me.

(I don't mean this in the sense of warping statistics to prove whatever you want to prove. I mean it in the sense of seeing how much "real life" information I can possibly wring out of a given set of data.)