Enough

I remember hearing or reading some form of this story long ago. I associated it with John C Bogle, the man who enabled Iris and me to retire in comfort, but apparently the money quote was said by Joseph Heller:

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.”

BTW, I have enough for us but if I had more, there are a lot of people and organizations that I wish I could help out financially.

photos from our trip to Japan

This is our first rough selection of photos from our trip to Japan. There are few comments at this point. We have been kept busy. In fact, I’m editing this in the bar of our hotel while Andrew and Chié and Lily-Iris visit a fish market.

To save time, take a look at these quick highlights.

flight from RDU to Seattle

Tacoma Glass Museum with cousins

Dave and Debra’s family in Kent

2023-08-06-flight-to-Tokyo

2023-08-07-Arrival-in-Japan

2023-08-07-walk-in-Nagano

2023-08-08-Tuesday-in-Nagano

2023-08-09-Bhuddist-temple-in-Nagano

More-2023-08-09

2023-08-10-Nagano

2023-08-11-Matsumoto

2023-08-11-Dinner-with-Uncle-Toshi

This is mislabled: 2023-08-11-dinner

2023-08-13-Chié’s-Fathers-house

2023-08-14-Chié’s-father

2023-08-15-Hiroko’s-breakfast-rabbit

2023-08-15-return-to-central-Nagano

2023-08-16-Karuizawa

2023-08-16-Good-bye-dinner-at-Chié’s-mother’s

2023-08-15-Uncle-Toshi’s-all-beef-feast. I thought of Mr Meat the whole evening. He would have been amazed.

2023-08-17-Nagano-to-Tokyo

2023-08-17-Chié’s-friend-Kyoko

2023-08-18-Koen-Park

2023-08-19-Nakano. Nakano is not Nagano; it’s a section of Tokyo.

MoveOn wants to amend the Constitution?

Ben & Jerry used their platform to encourage everyone to mark their money with a rubber stamp:

This is a terrible idea! Can you just imagine what a modern Constitutional Convention would be like?

Maybe if we could do it without a convention? They tried to do that with the Equal Rights Amendment, which came so close to passing. If we tried, how would we explain Hunter Biden?

Maybe I’ll get that rubber stamp after all.

Google Sheet Number Formatting

Google Sheets has fairly good formatting for displaying numbers and dates.

But I often use Google Sheets to create data for exporting to TSV files (for importing into markdown files).

Apparently I do it the wrong way because I often try to turn calculate dates that can be formatted. In the past, I tried to do lots of things, as illustrated in this table:

Here are the calculations used to make each column:

The thing that annoys the Hell out of me is that column y-m-d (pays no attention to leading zeros) uses the values in the month (calc) and day (calc) columns but loses the leading zeros. This drives me crazy.

However, much to my surprise, I recently tried making the date-n (formatted) column, which I formatted using the following method, works!

I’ve also figured out how to do it with some truly weird calculations.

This table:

is formatted with this crazy calculation:

and it works, too!

Here’s the calculation:

=CONCATENATE(YEAR(A2),“-”,RIGHT(CONCATENATE(“0”,TO_TEXT(MONTH(A2))),2),“-”,RIGHT(CONCATENATE(“0”,TO_TEXT(DAY(A2))),2))

To add a leading zero to a number, I concatenate the string “0” (not a number) to the number (itself converted to text) and then chop off everything but the two righmost digits. Ie works.

Summer Brake

A friend of mine (not a native speaker of English) (not that native speakers or even spelling correctors know any better) sent out this message:

« … on a besoin d’un petit repos… Summer brake! »

I thought about “correcting” her, but then I became aware of the poetry in this “misspelling”.

The word “should” be spelled “break”, and, yet, “brake” is kind of perfect, too! I mean, we need to slow down in the summer, don’t we?

Romantic technologies and ideologies

I’m intrigued by this article “That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, and the Computer Culture because it reminds me of the old days on the Whole Earth Catalog, Computer Lib (which I still have), etc. It’s interesting because of the tie-ins between computer culture, neoliberalism, and, for example, Google’s latest attempt to suppress the open web.

Moreover, the word Romantic triggered my memory of Arthur Miller, who called Communists “the last of the romantics” because they believed in human perfectibility (I read it in an analog Washington Post a couple of decades ago while visiting a friend in DC).