Don’t Let the [imaginary-future-] Perfect be the Enemy of the Good [-enough-today-and-tomorrow]
In the spirit of speed over perfection here are, briefly, a collection of things I’ve been planning to add to the website and could probably do a more detailed treatment of if this were like a paid full time job and my only project, which it is not. I have quite a bit of paid work to do at and family support from my Dad and his Hobby Farm & Home, and less than two weeks to prepare for and take an invitation-only test for JavaScript proficiency on Upwork.com, along with my personal projects and household- + self- maintenance things which as a single person are up to me, including the garden but excepting for the yard. So blog posting or other changes may slow down for a while. And some Coursera certifications from Meta and Google I’m paying a subscription for but not working on. And, soon when my postcards arrive in the mail, defeating Trump and his backers’ fascistic missions and their hold on their legions of cult followers. Ahem. So without further ado, a list:
On an additional note, whether the concept of ‘perfect’ along with platonic ideals and platonic forms are imaginary is another philosophical discussion which is not identical to the discussion of whether they are useful and/or harmful. As the imaginary number i and the zero (0) might tell us, but also much of geometry and math such as lines, planes, triangles, and integers. I challenge you to find a line, plane, or point in nature when the magnification is raised high enough! That is why the triangle glyph in my brainstorming/creativity/divination tool is named ‘The Deception’. So without yet-more-further-ado, here is a list of slated additions:
- From Cornell University Press is a book called Communicating Climate Change: A Guide for Educators. I read most of this book for a fall 2021 college presentation and paper having to do with the issues noted in the On Scale page and the idea that we don’t need to communicate more fear or to try to reach stubborn climate change deniers, but to try to induce what I have called ‘Existential Vertigo’ in people who are demotivated or overwhelmed with respect to global climate change and environment issues. It is small enough to break, and also small enough we can fix in addition to being so large no single human, country, or organization can tackle it. The book is available in hardcover and as a free PDF download from JSTOR, no account registration required.
- Cornell has also released 2 other books in their Cornell Series in Environmental Education and one of them is also available as ‘Open Access’, free PDF download with no account registration required from JSTOR. I have not read it and it is called: Advancing Environmental Education Practice and I will be adding these to my suggested reads page.
- I intend to create another, somewhat more focused website called Very Small Ocean at verysmallocean.org (nothing there yet) to include material from the 2021 presentation, the uncompleted 2021 paper, the front page of this website, a creative nonfiction paper from 2021 called ‘Seasickness’, and an improved version of the On Scale page. The uncompleted slides I used for the 30 minute presentation are still up at cooperdozier.com/presentation-v1/. The spacing, colors, fonts, and borders on it were just placeholders so don’t take that as a statement on my design skills. I have completed an improved frame for the presentation in code and design but still not finished the content of the slides or the paper yet. Cooperdozier.com does not have a homepage or other site materials yet.
- I had thought I came up with the phrase ‘Existential Vertigo’ on my own and that it somehow traveled around the world to appear as the last thing in the voiceover at the end of the music video by Lorde for Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen it All) which has a publishing date of 3/22/2022, but it also appears in the album version which came out on 8/20/2021, a bare few days after the IDC 401 course the presentation was done for started, and the presentation was not done until December. I may have used the phrase in class before then I do not know. And it’s possible I came up with it independently or that I heard it on the YouTube Music app and promptly forgot where it came from.
- I was not sure I had come up with comparing the Earth to the size of a basketball myself, and I think I have now identified the source, XKCD #1074: Moon Landing in the mouseover text where it says ‘if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human’s been more than a half inch from the surface’. I have read a great deal of XKCD over the years, many of them more than once, so this seems like I probably got it from there.
- A YouTube video called We WILL Fix Climate Change! from YouTube channel Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell.
Please also consider sending me a tip at Buy Me a Coffee and check out my GitHub project Easy Em or clicking on the banner or molecule image to buy an 11x3 inch magnet from my Zazzle Shop. You can also add gift or message text or transfer the image to another product on Zazzle and I will still get a royalty from it. I forget what percentage I set it to. No image link will show on the low-bandwidth site pages in narrow screens. The 681 reviews you see on Zazzle are for everything anyone has sold on Zazzle on the 11x3" car magnet (or just from one supplier?) not from my sales. My sales for that and the older Poetic Postcards postcard from the Psychic Fugue Studio (no longer online) days have been stuck at precisely zero for years. The 18,522 reviews are for all things sold on that postcard type on Zazzle.
One additional way you can support my work is to buy my book of poems, some of which are of the non-representational variety. You can buy it direct or find links for some stores including Amazon and iTunes at my BookBaby store page. You can read it on a phone or a desktop, no Kindle or tablet required, and depending on your eBook reader software, also print it out. Lastly, I'm not yet sure how Amazon wishlists work, but they seem to be used by some open source or app developers and also many people in the naked/scantily clad ladies on the Internet business, so I'll probably set one of those up.
New Excerpt: “Underestimating Success”
There is soon to be a new addition to the excerpts page, this from the chapter ‘The Quintessence’ of T. Thorn Coyle’s Make Magic of Your Life (2013), pg. 195-197. I first encountered Coyle’s work with Evolutionary Witchcraft on a birthday in 2007 when I felt the need of some sort of ritual, and that seemed to be the most serious book in the occult / new age section. I found in it a great deal of what I will call ‘life wisdom’ that I had not encountered from other sources. Coyle says that Make Magic of Your Life is not a book of witchcraft, it is a book for everyone. Too much good stuff really to pick just one, but this is what I flipped open to on 11/26, and it seemed a good fit to the web page. I myself do very little in the way of any magic, prayer, or other supernatural specific practices.
Underestimating Success
Success can be subtle; it sometimes masquerades as ordinary life.
By not settling for “good enough,” by following desire and applying will and intention to practice, by observing ourselves and our habits over time, we know ourselves better. Shifts occur. All of a sudden, we are not lost for days in emotional cycles or mental arguments. We may say we will do something and we follow through. More changes happen. We notice more. In this noticing, sometimes we fail to notice the biggest thing of all: we have had many successes. What we wished to ignite within ourselves now burns with a steady fire [ … ] We are living more integrated lives.
- continue reading.....
I also encountered the phrase from previous post about postcard design, ‘Ordinary Brilliance’ via Make Magic of your life.
GoFundMe for Ordinary Brilliance: Victory 2024, and Oratory for Dignity and Freedom Day
Bit tired from 24 hours ish of blogging and social media with limited breaks and sleep, so I am just reposting what I did elsewhere for now.
Ukraine has pronounced 11/22 as Dignity and Freedom day it seems
a powerful speech for all the world from ukraine’s president. apparently this newly pronounced Dignity and Freedom Day is the anniversary of the 2004 and 2014 revolutions as well as the 60th anniversary of JFKs assassination. I don’t remember very much about the 2004 thing
GoFundMe: Buy 1,000 Postcard Stamps and Defeat Fascism!
Being that it’s almost 4:30am I’ll be brief, the long explanation is --- [11/28/2023 update] the GoFundMe link previously listed is still up but has somehow
retroactively in time become unassociated with any email address I control. I will later be creating a new one. As of now as far as I can see, no one has given
anything to the original GoFundMe yet, so no worries there. I have retroactively in time ceased to have a GoFUndMe account but will be creating a new one.
Other security measures have also been taken. --- . I am asking for help for an activism project to help ensure Donald Trump loses the election, among some other goals and aspirations. I have already bought the postcards but am asking for some help to buy the stamps faster and with less belt-tightening. I will include the images (some edge areas may be taken up by bleed space so I couldn’t run the words all the way out and be sure they’d be fully printed):
[11/29/2023 update] Until I put up a new GoFundMe, if you want to send a tip my way, you can do so via Buy Me a Coffee at buymeacoffee.com/cooperdozier. Also, if you do websites or need a website, check out my GitHub project Easy Em at github.com/cooperdozier/easy-em/.
Rising Site Traffic
Traffic to savetheoxygen.org has increased in the last couple of months. It has risen from about 1,100 to 1,950 unique visitors per 30 days according to CloudFlare. Singapore has frequently occurred in my top 5 countries for a long time, and now the Netherlands have joined them in what seems like it may be a persistent way. That’s for request counts, not unique visitors. I’m I guess this reflects their status as small low-lying nations with reclaimed land, so they have special concern for ocean (-rising) issues, together with high internet penetration, per capita income, and English language speakers. For the 7 day figures, they are numbers 2 and 3 behind the united states and 3 and 4 behind the US and Canada in the 30 day figures. These small nations individually exceed visits from China, also a top 5-er.
Canada’s number is outsize, but for questionable reasons, since on 10/24-10/25 I had a spike to 2.97k requests of which Cloudflare says 846 were ‘unclassified’ threats, on my usual number of 1-5 ‘threats’ in 30 days. This may I think have been a spike in real traffic through a poorly set up or compromised internet service provider since the HTML fraction was high then. I have only Cloudflare’s free features and my own self to work with, so I can’t say with much more certainty or detail. The content-type of requests is 75% HTML for the past 30 days, a little high, and Canada was a significant chunk of that.
Also of note, for unknown reasons Cloudflare dropped to registering 0 traffic for part of 11/2 and for 11/3, which I have not seen before but is probably a technical artifact, since I could still reach the site at the time.
The HTML fraction of total requests usually runs about 53 to maybe 69% on the 24 hour and seven day windows. I think changes in the HTML fraction is a good proxy for changes in actual human visitors. There are increases in both web crawlers and real humans whenever changes are made to the site as the crawlers seek to index new content de facto and according to the sitemap.xml, and search engines uprank sites and pages that publish new content regularly. There has been a persistent increase from a lower baseline to the present 53-70% HTML fraction since I started improving the site in 2019. The content and code quality were not so great in 2016-Spring 2019.
That is about all for today. Thanks to everyone who reads and who is making an effort for climate change mitigation and biosphere protection!
Cooper Dozier, November 5th, 2023>
—Which is, according to the author, "an attempt to see time as something other than money."
(highlighting mine)
" reading this in the midst of another nightmare fire season—one that started much earlier than usual—I recognize and sympathize with my own sentiment. Yet I've also begun to see such nightmares as my internalization of declinism, the belief that a once-stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom. As distinct from a clearheaded (and heartbroken) assessment of our situation, declinism is probably one of the more dangerous forms of linear, deterministic time reckoning there is. After all, it is one thing to acknowledge the past and future losses that follow from what has occurred; it is another to truly see history and the future proceeding with the same grim amorality as the video playhead, where nothing is driving it except itself. In failing to recognize the agency of both human and nonhuman actors, such a view makes struggle and contingency invisible and produces nihilism, nostalgia, and ultimately paralysis. " Read more...
Cooper Dozier, October 30th, 2023
Open Source for the Site Menu/Submenu System
I’ve created a GitHub repository where you can find a version of this site’s menu/submenu system stripped down to essentials and without the actual site content (Lorem Ipsum, you know). The way I wrote it is designed to make it easy to adjust the number of menu and submenu items without having them overflow, overflow invisibly, or leave empty space for both narrow screens and phones and wide screens. The instructions are mostly in the annotations to the code, but the short version is that even if you don’t know JavaScript, as long as you know enough about HTML and CSS you just ajust 3 height values in the JavaScript to match space required by the number and style of your menu and submenu items. I am calling it Easy Em. It is MIT Licensed. Click through to GitHub to learn more.
If your small business, organization, or project needs only static pages and a contact form, you can achieve that without any programming using this system + a Formspree subscription with your web host. If you'd like to set up a site like that but have someone else do it, email me ([email protected]) and we can work something out through UpWork or another channel.
Cooper Dozier, October 27th, 2023
Physical Vectors of Information (Paper > Social Media)
One thing that you could do to advance progress on slowing and reversing climate change organically is to spread the word. I’m a big believer in the power of print, text, and paper (including images) to make a stronger, longer lasting, and more enduring impact on peoples’ and communities’ mentalities and future actions over ephemeral social media posts or web pages and videos that have to coexist in the infinitely crowded digital sphere with them. A physical, printed object, on the other hand, sticks around and has the opportunity to be reflected upon multiple times, perhaps even kept for longer term reference.
So, one idea I have is that we could spread practical advice for fighting climate change via the Little Free Library network (find them near you: map). Little Free Libraries are outdoor boxes where anyone can leave a book or take a book, or other things, such as booklets and flyers. One flyer I would recommend is from the good people at Rewiring America: Electrify Everything Handout. Of course, be respectful, don’t try to monopolize the library boxes that your neighbors have invested to provide. But a few flyers now and then might go a long way toward accelerating change at the household level. And people engaged at the household level will spread ripples out in their words, communities, and political and organizational choices.
Remember, the key audience here is not the shrinking fraction of stubborn climate change deniers, but people who understand climate change is real but are disengaged, weakly engaged, or fatalistic about our ability to mitigate and reverse it. The world is small enough for us to break badly, but also small enough that we can repair and heal it!
Project Drawdown is also a great resource, but I have only found one printable resource that’s short enough for this vector of distribution: Climate Poverty Connections Factsheet
P.S. And lets not be taken in by the illusion that all the video streaming and social media are free! While not especially high, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated in 2020 that one hour of streaming video produced a global average of 36 g CO2 (Carbon footprint of streaming video; fact checking the headlines, paragraph 5), while also noting that improvements in computing technology and shifts to hyperscale data center designs may have kept electricity use in data centers flat since 2015 on a 200% increase in global internet traffic. Meanwhile, a sheet of office paper (A4) might have a carbon footprint of around 4.5g CO2 (Comparison of methodologies for estimating the carbon footprint – case study of office paper,- 2012 - highlights section. This was the first google result, I haven’t done a broad comparison of research)
Cooper Dozier, October 20, 2023
A New Addition to the Suggested Reads Page
Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking
by D.Q. McInerny
I have yet to finish this one, but it is interesting and readable and does not resort to the pages of problems and strings of symbols that are typical of textbooks.] I took 2 courses in logic in college, Introductory Logic and Symbolic Logic, around 2006-2007. It is not an exaggeration to say that they changed my life and helped me resolve some thorny problems. The stuff we covered in Introductory could, I believe, easily and profitably be taught in middle school around the same time as algebra is introduced. It seems to me that logic is more broadly applicable to thinking through everyday problems and reaching a sound understanding of facts than is arithmetic. Yet, our educational system relegates it to the departments of Philosophy or Computer Science at the university level rather than alongside the 5 paragraph essay and x + y = 11.
From the publisher's blurb:
Elegant, pithy, and precise, Being Logical breaks logic down to its essentials through clear analysis, accessible examples, and focused insights. D. Q. McInerney covers the sources of illogical thinking, from naïve optimism to narrow-mindedness, before dissecting the various tactics—red herrings, diversions, and simplistic reasoning—the illogical use in place of effective reasoning.
An indispensable guide to using logic to advantage in everyday life, this is a concise, crisply readable book. Written explicitly for the layperson, McInerny's Being Logical promises to take its place beside Strunk and White's The Elements of Style as a classic of lucid, invaluable advice.
Praise for Being Logical
“Highly readable . . . D. Q. McInerny offers an introduction to symbolic logic in plain English, so you can finally be clear on what is deductive reasoning and what is inductive. And you'll see how deductive arguments are constructed.”
— Detroit Free Press
Cooper Dozier, 11/20/2022
Blog and Shop Opening, 1st Post
In order to explore new information, additions, and thoughts in a format that doesn't require a full site update, I am adding
a blog to explore whatever's on my mind about the site, what I'm working on, or what is planned. More posts to come.
Help support the work of Save the Oxygen and get a portable piece of artwork here:
my shop at zazzle.com ]
Cooper Dozier, January 31, 2022
