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_WarOld 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 <sasm...@swcp.com> Date:
7/4/24 6:03 AM (GMT+01:00) To: friam@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 OLD1I 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-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .FRIAM
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