init

Archive/Blog Drafts/An Open Letter to FRC Students.md

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+> Notice what it is that people believe to be most important in our common life on earth. If you went to the Great Exposition, you might suppose that the most important thing is to make machines that turn things, so as to work other machines, to do things we want them to do, or to make things we want them to make. If you went to Chartres, you would not need to suppose, you would simply and readily perceive that the most important thing was to sing with the Psalmist, "I rejoiced when I heard them say, Let us go up to the house of the Lord."
+> Out of the Ashes by Anthony Esolen, ch. 2
+
+When you go to an FRC competition, you can often get lose in a notion that the most important thing is to make machines that throw balls, so as to trip scoring sensors, to score 'points' we want them to.
+
+https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/big-tech-founders-gates-neumann-jobs/671519/

Archive/Blog Drafts/Anthropology + Prudence.md

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+IC|XC
+--+--
+NI|KA
+
+People are fairly aware that something is going 'wrong' with technological development, even in the secular world. There is much talk about humanist design - "human-centered", "humanitarian".
+
+At first blush this seems good - instead of building machines for their own sake, we build them for ours. But what is our sake? What is good for man? What is man for? Where did he come from - where does he go? Humanely developing technology is not a technical problem or even just a political one - it is an anthropological one.
+
+Good technology begins with good anthropology.
+
+I may ask you to make a glove for my hand but if you do not know its measure, much less its form, how can you begin? If you misunderstand, will you not merely waste material?
+
+Most "humanitarian" efforts are concerned predominantly with man's physical well-being, and in particular, alleviating sufferring. Most forms of physical sufferring are well-understood: hunger, disease, war, inadequate shelter. Reducing these is good, but focusing on them can be a distraction or an excuse from the higher things, as Judas did when the woman perfumed Jesus' feet. The ends do not justify the means - we need balance.
+
+Man is for union with God - cooperation with divine grace - the cultivation of virtue. He is the soil from which the virtues grow. This is lofty - poetic - beautiful, but by itself offers little more than the message of "reducing human sufferring". What is needed is a well-developed anthropology - an understanding of these virtues.
+
+The sort of thinking we have in today's world - the air we breathe - is machine thinking. It is mathematic, calculating, and most importantly: all-encompassing; ideological. We seek to account for everything on a quest for a grand unifying equation of the world. No such theory is possible - both God and Godel will tell you that. There must be room for the transcendent. There must be room for dispensation. We must use judgement and prudence rather than defer to machines. To to otherwise is a misunderstanding of our role in creation as steward, and to let our sense of prudence atrophy.
+
+The charioteer of the virtues is Prudence - she commands the others, knowing when one is required and the other not. Prudence is built not by a sort of mathematical logic and reason - machine thinking - but by a long process of observation, decision-making, and study. Holy Tradition provides us with a rich well from which to pull in developing prudence. Only in the Church will we find the graces and knowledge necessary for human flourishing. Let us look to her for help in developing our prudence, so that we may design in accordance with God's command.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Conscious and Unconscious.md

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+
+I've been watching a lot of Van Niestat lately. And coming to the realization that he's a huge reason why I got hooked on shop life - when I saw his film [Ten Bullets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49p1JVLHUos), I was entranced. Here is a man speaking in an entrancing way about a code used to make something. Here is a man talking about tools and productivity. But he isn't just talking about tools and productivity. He's talking about morality. But he isn't just talking about morality. He's talking about the good life. He's talking about relationship.
+
+As I sit here writing and reassessing my position in this cosmos, I'm understanding a dimension of my work and the way that I approach engineering which has always been present, but has been muted. Hushed. Neutered. The artisanal spirit.
+
+For the past three years and change, I've been formally employed as a "mechanical design engineer". Those are some fancy words. They capture decently what I do. I design things. Those things are usually mechanical. And I run some calculations to support the designs and ensure they won't fail. All well and good. Yet - there's definitely more to it than that conscious level. There's something a layer down. A something which has always led to some conflict in team environments, or at least some pent-up repression.
+
+Good engineers (of which, people say I am one) are artists. We have instincts.
+
+We look at things and say, "that's going to break." We don't even know why at first. The ratios are wrong. Sometimes we're wrong, but often we're right. A 2-inch diamter, 10 foot long shaft is going to twist. No way around that. Best be taking a second look at that.
+
+The analytical mind cannot create. It cannot concieve. The analytical mind can only destroy.
+
+>[A]nalytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing.
+> - C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Chapter 3
+
+Engineers, the ones who build, are not rationalists. We don't reason our way into a design. We only reason our way out. What do we do instead?
+
+Proposal. Posit a schematic. Posit some components. Posit the length of the shaft. The size of the keyway. The dowel pin size. The material. The length. We propose on a second-by-second basis. If we slow down to analyze everything, the project grinds to a halt. So we propose.
+
+Submission. Here is where analytics help - by destroying other options. You want a m6 pin to have a slip fit in the hole, but don't know what size to make the hole. Analysis says nothing but an H7 hole will do. Guess we're stuck with H7.
+
+Guess that's what I'm doing now. I propose, and I submit. I send a quote, I do the work. I give an idea, I play it out.
+
+And then we check. Type-A-System-1-Rational brain comes in after that and says it's dumb. Or it's great. But rational brain can't come up with that. So we can't let him take too much control.
+
+Be a little irrational. It's the only way to create.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Conversion.md

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+# No Throwaways - Only Conversion
+
+\Sigma dm/dt = 0
+
+Energy and matter cannot be destroyed, only converted.
+
+When you throw something away, you merely displace it. It isn't gone. Something happens to it. Toxins, viruses - they are not destroyable, only disposable.
+
+Well, the matter comprising them is not. The forms of them, though, are. The arrangements of atoms and molecules is malleable. Interestingly, though, such alteration requires energy - or more aptly, energy (or at least many forms of it) is the arrangement of the atoms and molecules.
+
+Even the metaphor of fire - cleansing fire - is one of conversion. Fire converts fuel into ash and smoke, and in the process, unlocks the light within something. The form is utterly destroyed - the material is utterly unrecognizable - but the material is still there, now ready to be returned to other converting processes, reforming the raw material.
+
+It's worth meditating on this. If we work towards the conversion of someone or something, we necessarially start with something. Even what we consider "building anew" is building with existing materials. When we are given a blank slate, we are still given slate - not raw potentiality itself. The fullness of that freedom belongs only to God Himself.
+
+The refiner of metal burns off the dross - but does not burn off the pure metal itself.
+
+Thomas Cahill in his excellent _How The Irish Saved Civilization_ writes that Saint Patrick "had transmuted their pagan virtues of loyalty, courage, and generosity into the Christian equivalents of faith, hope, and charity." There is a transformation, not a wholesale discarding. We should expect to see some of the old in new, converted things.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Creation.md

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+Why are we here?
+
+This question is a meme. And man has longed to answer this question.
+
+And of course, we should look to the beginning for understanding.
+
+The Atra-Hasis, an early creation myth, begins with greater gods, who create lesser gods to keep the earth. These lesser gods then tire, and seek to overthrow their higher gods. The higher gods propose a countersolution: creating a new underclass of humans to carry out their work. This is a story of strife and conflict. A story where the Gods are not omnipotent, but just... fairly powerful.
+
+[Going over Genesis]
+
+Genesis paints a very different picture.
+
+God creates the garden

Archive/Blog Drafts/Direct Control.md

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+# Assuming Direct Control
+
+## An Audi
+
+Matthew Crawford in his excellent "Why We Drive" writes about his experience of driving an Audi RS3: 
+
+	The Audi RS3 makes 400 horsepower from a furbocharged, five-cylinder engine mated to a seven-speed, dual-clutch automatic transmission with paddle shifters... I was a little worried this test run might ruin the experience of driving an old Volkswagen, however radically mortified.
+
+	[...]
+
+	I eased out of the parking lot; we navigated through some suburban streets and then onto an expressway. There were a few on-ramps in the course of the drive, and traffic was light enough for some spirited maneuvers. But I could not connect with the car. I had it in the most aggressive of its driving modes (these determine the throttle map, shift responses, and suspension settings), but it still felt like there was a layer of decision-making happening somewhere else. The paddle shifters felt like what they in fact are: mere logic gates. I'm sure living with the car for an extended period would have allowed me to develop more feel for it, more connection, but my first impression was that it seemed to have its own priorities. It took my shift commands as a general statement of mood, a request to be given due consideration when the committee next convenes. The car never spoke rudely to me of being wrong, as when I nearly rolled my 1963 Beetle. It was more like "Your opinion is important to us." I must have been doing _something_ wrong, but was left to speculate what this might be.
+
+## Hugo
+
+I just re-did my [personal website](https://www.thadhughes.xyz). In doing so, I finally [wrote it from near-scratch](https://www.thadhughes.xyz/portfolio/site). If you've ever worked with a static-site generator, they're billed as being super easy to use with tons of ready-to-use themes out there.
+
+Garbage. Cruft. So much of it.
+
+I never find a theme quite the way I like it. So I pop the hood to try and tweak it. There's a master template file that uses a few sub-templates, which then use a few more sub-templates, and a big SASS file referencing a config file referencing.... there's so much interconnection. The solution seems worse than the problem of manually writing the HTML for each page.
+
+In re-writing my theme, I assumed direct control. Both in the sense that I rolled my own, but in the sense that the theme I left had a very thin template. The content files allow you to put in CSS overrides.
+
+By default, in writing content for the site, you have a simple "user-friendly" interface. But the manual overrides exist.
+
+You may still assume direct control. Want to inject raw HTML? Go for it.
+
+## Combine Auger
+
+On the farm, we've been having an intermittent issue on our combine's unload auger. In the cab, you push the button to deploy the auger - then a few milliseconds go by before an error message comes up, telling you that the position of the auger (read by a rotary sensor) doesn't match what was expected, and so the combine has gone into emergency shutoff mode.
+
+What's the fix?
+
+Presumably, the correct fix is to replace the sensor and get correct readings. But I mean, what does this sensor _do_? In the grand scheme of things, nothing. This machine would function perfectly fine if the operator had direct control over the hydraulic cylinder that deploys and stows the auger. Aside from deploying it into a rigid object outside the machine (which the rotary sensor would not stop), there is nothing the operator could do through a manual override that would damage the machine.
+
+Yet, there is no such manual override.
+
+The fix we took? Get on top of the combine and push the auger out. This fooled the sensor, I guess - and the problem went away. Was this the safest thing to do? Didn't this sensor actually make the situation less safe, or at least, less productive?
+
+Whether the sensor is necessary or not in the grand scheme of things is another question but it remains obvious: a manual override would have improved safety and productivity.
+
+Subsidiarity was violated, and we suffered for it.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Emasculation of Buttons.md

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+# STUCK IN NEUTRAL
+
+In the beginning, there was man, who worked directly with his own hands.
+
+Then, the lever, which allowed him to modulate the ratio of the speed and force of his movements. Then, animals, and combustion of fuel - enabling him to use power beyond his own body. Electrification led to his control of vast power with the mere push of a button. In the past few decades, the button stopped being hooked to the power itself, and instead, to a computer - reaching, eventually, its final abstraction in the screen - the "software button".
+
+Further alienation occurs at every level, but the current alienation we see in our machines is especially pernicious.
+
+For the past week I have been driving a tractor - a Challenger MT740. Now, this tractor is pretty high-tech. Affitted to the diesel engine is a CVT transmission - this doesn't have multiple "gears" to shift through, but rather a sliding scale of gear ratio. I suppose the designers could have chosen to give direct access to the CVT - although I've never seen any designers do this on any vehicle. The closest would be a Subaru I've driven once where you could activate what I call "fake manual" mode - giving you a selection of eight virtual "gears" to "shift" through.
+
+I would love to try driving a vehicle which let you command the CVT ratio and engine RPM directly. I think this would be a pretty cool and novel experience. Perhaps the transmission ratio would be expressed in terms of percentage. Or perhaps you could even express it in a meaningful number conducive to quick mental math (If, say, a transmission position of "3" meant that at 1000 engine RPM, the vehicle ground speed would be 3MPH - how cool would that be?).
+
+The designers of this tractor chose two primary modes of commanding the engine and transmission - a foot pedal mode and a joystick mode. In both, the throttle and gear ratio are abstracted away from the operator (there are some overrides). Instead, the operator commands in terms of acceleration rather than raw throttle and gear ratio. This has great advantages - it's quite easy to learn, and it prevents the user from breaking anything. 
+
+However, the devil's in the details. There's a really heavy software middle layer that is just. Clunky. I'm gonna focus on the foot pedal mode to show some of the quirks.
+
+Firstly, you need to pick a direction before you can move - forwards or reverse. This is done by use of the joystick. You must squeeze a trigger button on the joystick and then push the joystick either forwards or backwards to select a direction. Now, mind you, this is a momentary joystick. It returns to center. So by pushing the stick forwards, you are asking the software to go into a certain state - the state of vehicle direction is stored in the software, not the hardware. If you want to know what state the machine is in you need to remember it or look at indicators on the dashboard. You cannot use your hand to feel the position. But wait - it's worse.
+
+If you don't move within 8 seconds, the software resets the movement direction state to neutral. So you can't just remember what vehicle state you asked for - you have to also remember if it's been 8 seconds since you commanded position.
+
+Imagine if while stopped at a red light your car popped out of drive and into neutral of its own volition - this is basically the behavior.
+
+This sounds like a minor complaint but one of the things I'm using this tractor for is unloading grain onto a truck. This entails making small adjustments and movements - and sometimes staying put while waiting for conditions to change. It also means that when I want to move, I want to move immediately without hesitation.
+
+The middle software layer presents a conundrom: I can't select my next direction immediately (the command will time out). I can't wait until I'm ready to move to make a direction selection (it takes time for this command to process). I also can't just hold the joystick in the forward state to guaruntee the next direction (the computer system throws error messages at me). The only sort of solution I've come to is to periodically tap the accelerator pedal, resetting the 8 second direction command timeout.
+
+I am fighting a state machine.
+
+Marc Barnes has written and spoken on several occassions on how the modern automobile presents us with a frustration: we have the power to go 100 miles per hour, perhaps even more, but laws and traffic prevent us. We are frustrated because we see that there is a mismatch between potentiality and actuality.
+
+There is a breakdown between what I intuitively think should happen, which is rooted in what I am trying to achieve, and what the machine thinks should happen - and I do mean that the machine is thinking. There is a change of state. Where once the machine would move forwards when I pushed the pedal, it changed its mind, and decided that pushing the pedal should instead do nothing. It changed its mind of its own volition. At least, it seems that it is of its own volition - it is actually the volition of the tractor software designers. Furthermore, a chasm of communication widens: I cannot communicate to the machine that I do not like this. I cannot alter the software and remove this 8 second timeout. The tractor speaks to me and dictates its terms: if you don't move in 8 seconds, I'm giving up.
+
+Now, there's nothing inherently wrong about things dictating their terms to us. Wood can be split along the grain, not against it. Concrete is mixed and liquid before being dried. Material reality has a truth to it. It would be wrong for us to have infinite flexibility with the created world. But there is a difference between being barred from something's nature, as the tractor software is doing, and being unable to use something in a particular way because its nature is fundamentally at odds with that use.
+
+It truly doesn't need to be this way. The 8 seconds is arbitrary. There is no reason it could not be 2 minutes, or 2 seconds. It is fully imposed from an artifice of the programmer's mind. The mechanical components are perfectly capable of waiting longer between recieving the directional command and the go-ahead from the foot, but the programmer has decreed otherwise.
+
+Decree is a good analogy - the folks at Full Stack Theology have developed an idea that code is law for computers, which seems spot-on to me.
+
+As we know, good law requires dispensation. The idea that the law should apply equally to all peoples in all places is actually a falsehood - not to say that there should be some "above the law" - but that the law ought to apply differently in different circumstances, some of which cannot be foreseen by the legislators. The programmers of this tractor may have had a good idea on the timeout - but it's an idea I cannot appreciate because it does not apply to my circumstance. It should be one I, donning the role of deputy governor over this machine, should be able to adjust. However the closed-source distribution model does not delegate these powers of dispensation to me. I am frustrated. I ought to have the freedom to adjust this behavior, but it is not dispensed to me.
+
+Instead, a bureaucratic monolith legislates how my machine is to operate, and I remain frustrated - alienated from this thing I own, gawking at the chasm between potentiality and actuality, without even the materials by which to build a bridge.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Engineer as Priest.md

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+# Engineer as Priest
+
+The protestant reformation was a response, in part, to abuses of priestly power - the selling of indulgences as a common exemplar.
+
+You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave.
+
+ (Matthew 20:25-27)
+
+The priest does not lord authority, He serves. He is a means by which one meets God, even acting In persona Christi. But he is not, himself, God - the ultimate.
+
+So likewise do technologists of all sorts act as priests - mediators between laypeople and their technologies. The just techno-priest does not lord their authority over the layman, charging exorbitant fees and discouraging self-help. Nor does the just techno-priest chastise the layman with their woes for being stupid and ignorant.
+
+The technocrats of our age are often corrupt. They lord it over us. 

Archive/Blog Drafts/FINISHED - INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS.md

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+Square rule timber framing is a development upon scribe rule timber framing. In Scribe rule, sides of a building are laid out at once with all their pieces. The pieces are levelled, and lines are drawn between every piece. From conception, every piece is considered to go into the whole. Why all this trouble? Well, hewing timbers sucks. You don't always get things straight, and you definitely don't always get timbers to the dimensions you'd like. So, you match all the pieces together.
+
+Square rule came about in the Americas. It's a uniquely American thing, because we came up with squares.
+
+Well, at least, we popularized them.
+
+Take the timbers you've hewn, pick two nice faces on them, then ignore the bad faces. Make all the measurements from these good faces. In this way, you will be removing material down to a "perfect timber within". You will be getting to the ideal timber.
+
+This means, especially on large buildings, [stacked voice effect] interchangable parts.
+
+Which is another thing we Americans popularized. Legend has it that Thomas Jefferson met a certain gunsmith, Honore Blanc, who was making parts in a very different way than other craftsmen at the time. He was making jigs for production, and fixtures to check his parts against. He wasn't testing triggers against stocks and making one-off pieces like his predecessors, he was testing triggers against trigger fixtures, and stocks against stock fixtures, so that you could take apart ten muskets, scramble the pieces, and put them back together and have a functioning musket.
+
+Now, today, this is just how we do things. This is the American mode of manufacturing - we make parts to their ideal form. But at the time, this is revolutionary.
+
+Square rule is doing the same thing. We're not checking our mortises and tenons against each other; we're checking them against standard measurements. Against blueprints, or at least mental blueprints.
+
+The consequences of this shift, we all know. This enabled further division of labor, and paved the way for the assembly line. The guy making triggers, or the guy making a tie beam here, doesn't need to understand the overall assembly. He just needs to understand the requirements for his part.
+
+[PAUSE]
+
+We could lock everyone up in little isolated rooms, hand them a blueprint, and everything would fit together just fine and dandy. The guys cutting the timbers need not even be present for raising day.
+
+[WALKING INTO A ROOM AND HANDING SOMEONE A BLUEPRINT, THEN SHUTTING THE DOOR]
+
+Well, maybe the worker wouldn't be so happy about this.
+
+Locked by yourself, lacking an understanding of the overall vision, is no way to be. This is a surefire way to increase despondency. Acedia. Disinterest.
+
+Why the emotional turmoil? They did their work well. They should take pride in their work! They can measure it and inspect it with better tools; they should have greater appreciation of their own work, not less, surely.
+
+Is information enough?
+Is this pursuit of the perfect timber, of pure form, enough?
+Do we need more technological gizmos to increase the enjoyment?
+[VIDEO OF CHAIN MORTISER]
+
+[TIMELAPSE - SPED UP A LOT A LOT]
+
+No, we desire higher truths - we desire to see the telos of our handiwork; we desire to know if what we did worked in the final application of it. Because as analyzable and individualizable as man is, he is not meant to stand alone, just as each of these timbers is not meant to stand alone. They are meant to fit together in relationship.

Archive/Blog Drafts/FINISHED - TRANSCENDENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.md

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+All things need renewal. This is a renewal. A renewal of the purpose of this exploration.
+
+The man on this exploration is a seeker. What is he seeking?
+
+	Video: I was praying the other day: God, reveal your face to me. And I remembered that I wrote this quote on the front of my journal: Time spent in God's creation reveals the face of God. Upon seeing that, I knew I needed to leave for a while. To bug out. That's what here is today - a bug out.
+
+He is seeking God. Always has been. Hopefully, always will be. Something in him knows that's why he poured energy into competitive robotics. Into building racecars. But he got wrapped around an axle. An axle - or should we say, axis - he's still trying to unwrap from. It's not a bad axis. It's just orthogonal.
+
+Worldliness. Here in the wilderness, in small towns of Maine, in front of a beautiful waterfall, there is still worldliness when these things are taken for their own sake. For the cheap material thrills.
+
+	Video:
+	 - Exhibiting a piece of plywood: "This is the world as we know it through our senses and rationality. The material world."
+	 - Pointing at a hole in the board: "But we know... there's an incompleteness. A discrepancy. It's the same hole that Godel points to in his incompleteness theorem; it's the infinite abyss that Pascal speaks of.
+	 - Grabbing a piece of metal and fitting it into the hole: "That hole is begging for something higher to fill it. The fact of the matter, though, is that it is not filled - but transcended."
+
+If  you've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you know how Robert Pirsig wrestles with this. His Phaedrus finds that there's something beyond the mind-matter dualism that he just can't define, but he knows is real, although it isn't in the system. He sees the hole. More importantly, he's been wrapt up in its transcendence. He knows there's things he can't define. He knows that there's patterns and forms of things in the world - but that these patterns are not bounded by the world, cannot be contained in it. Even in the simple act of extracting a screw from an engine, there is Quality to be had. Quality. Virtue. Excellence.
+
+Excellence. That's what he's after. He met it a few times. Once with a FIRST Lego League robot. Simple design. Servicable. Looked elegant. Explainable and justifiable top to bottom. Even the 'hack' of taking the computer out and putting it in a different chassis to accomplish a different task was excellent - it was, even there, a gesturing towards transcendence. Excellent. That boy thought he captured lightning in a bottle.
+
+Excellence. That's what he felt when he walked into the Divine Liturgy for the first time. When he does back to confession. When he puts new gas shocks on the laser cutter. When his student finally understands a concept. He wants everything to have this excellence, because it's just so... excellent.
+
+"I came so that they might have life, and have it abundantly." Not just life but excellence. 
+
+What is it?
+
+Pirsig is right. You can't define it. But you, man, have sense for it when you see it. And if you are more attune, you can sense where it will be.
+
+What are you to be attune to, though? Examples, motions, machines, learning, books, spreadsheets, rational analysis? We will fully understand the laws of this universe and with enough computation we will solve all of the problems and shift off this mortal coil!
+
+No.
+
+That's a failure to transcend. At best it's just shuffling  material. At worst, it's making machines that take up tasks that you do and fill up room in this material plane. Freeing yourself up for something alright - extinction; death; and your replacement by purely material things.
+
+Okay, what are we to be attune to, then?
+
+The Agio Pneuma. The Holy Spirit. God's gentle breath from his face. Ruah. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. Only He can bring us upwards, and He wishes so desperately to do so - if we will only cultivate the eye for it, he will bring it over into the world.
+
+Upon hearing these words I think there can be a faulty insistence to literally lay down everything and go be a hermit and do nothing but meditate. To push really hard - which is a physical activity - and just slip into pure "enlightened consciousness". I get it. But here's the rub. Every man is called to be priest, prophet, and king.
+
+Those are high professions. And what do each of these do? They are a conduit - a link - of the transcendent into this world. God wants all grafted into Him, and he has picked you, man, capable of the universe - to do so. As Christ has done, go forth and do likewise.
+
+Technologists are special kinds of priests, prophets, and kings. We are here not to "make sure the tech doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy" or something like that.
+
+GOD made man the steward of creation. That's what we're here to do with technology - part of creation. Steward it. Bring it into relationship with God, not by imbuing it with consciousness or transcendence (things we do not have authority to gift), but through our very selves.
+
+If you are a technologist, you are to bring technology into relationship with Him through your self; to establish a relationship between technology and God so that He may be glorified on earth. Not to capture God in a box - to set up this relationship with the Father, as Christ has done for us, we do likewise.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Fixturing.md

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+Today, I used a vacuum hold device to hold some shelves while I was working on them.
+
+I will _never_ go back to clamps to do that again. It was just so effortless to place my work on the vacuum chuck, have it not move, and route, plane, and sand away - on the entire surface. Don't have to fandangle around the hold-down point. Don't have to worry about it coming a bit loose. Easy to use. Genius invention. Grabo is the name.
+
+I realized that good fixturing does two things at once:
+1. Holds a workpiece from moving around under external force.
+2. Presents the relevant sides of a workpiece at a useful angle/location.
+
+That's it. It's not incredibly hard.
+
+Christ probably was hearkening back to his carpentry days when we talked of building upon rock.
+
+	Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7:24-27)
+
+Hm. Good fixturing is important in the spiritual life, too. Our bodies are temples; houses of God - they must be build on rock; they must be properly fixtured. In setting up our daily rituals, we need fixtures that prevent drifting, yet still present the sides of our life to God to be worked on - room for analysis, room to let Him in. To maximise both useful presentation and anchoring.
+

Archive/Blog Drafts/Get your Religion out of my Technology

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+
+
+I must always preach Christ and him crucified!
+
+Salvation is to be found only in the Church - in Baptism.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Get your Religion out of my Technology.md

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+# What's God got to do with it, anyways?
+
+Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that there is a great distress around technology and its byproducts these days. Social media. Vaccines. Petroleum Products. Climate change. Software-As-A-Service. Right-To-Repair. Microplastics. Heavy metals.
+
+Every engineering decision carries truly a moral weight.
+
+To say otherwise is the heresy of secularism - that there are things outside the purview of Christ's kingdom. Even the smallest decision of whether or not to comment a line of code leaves its mark, however small, on the fabric of the world.
+
+Technologists of our age are faced with this in an amplified way, since we have tapped into sources of vast power - both metaphorical and real. A misplaced decimal point has the power to keep an airplane aloft, or crash and burn.
+
+The effects are even deeper though - the decision to route a highway one way or another can foster or divide a community. The envisioning of cars as we have them rather than they were a hundred years ago has had effects that we cannot even fathom. The world around us is increasingly shaped by our technologies.
+
+It isn't merely that how we think affects how we form the world around us - the world around us also forms our minds and hearts; these same minds and hearts that Christ loves.
+
+The kingdom is at hand.
+
+Brothers and sisters, we are not here to kill time until the fullness of it comes. We are here to be the hands of Christ - to continue the work of the Divine Carpenter. What more awesome, noble, worthwhile task could an engineer endeavor to?
+
+Opposing this is a spirit of liberalism - a self-centered, egotistical spirit concerned with what is most profitable, most enjoyable. Concerned with "reconciling" Christianity with the constructs of our world, rather than converting our constructs to the fullness of truth, beauty, and goodness.
+
+A spirit of transhumanism opposes this as well - that we will remake the world anew in our own image and likeness, and cast aside the shackles of old curmudgeony 'morality'. This will still inevitably run into the hard limitations of the laws of physics, but even if it didn't, would result in a world as fun as a game with no rules played in a frictionless vacuum - the ultimate paradox of choice evaporating all meaning.
+
+We must envision technological development through the mind of Christ - we must learn from the great deposit of wisdom that we have been given and continue to be given through the Holy Spirit if we are to move towards the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Kingdom Technology.md

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+> And, an invitation to a little kingdom
+
+I've been quiet here for a while. God has held my tongue - he has needed to nourish me for a while before it would behoove me to speak. He's made me really rethink what I'm doing here and the 'why' behind this endeavor. His voice has been louder recently, and rather plain in tone. Here's what he's been telling me.
+
+What did Christ do for us?
+
+	with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.
+	 - Revelation 5:9-10
+
+Christ came to establish a kingdom - a kingdom we are called to be a part of - and this is the interesting rub - in order to serve. It's actually a lot like the whole "servant-leadership" concept that gets bandied around the corporate world. Servant rulers. And in case it wasn't clear - the greek word for reign (βασιλεύσουσιν) is the same root as kingdom (βασιλείαν).
+
+This isn't some mixed-up translation; it's all about kingdom.
+
+And yes, KING-dom. Not presidency. Divine monarchy. A rulership which is hereditary; a rulership that is familial. All of us who have put on Christ have been grafted into his glorious kingdom - and _why_?
+
+If you've been reading the daily readings for the past month, it seems like we just can't get past the upper room discourse (John 14-17). There is this word that keeps coming up and this pattern that keeps being reinforced.
+
+Glory.
+
+But it's more than just the glory - it's about the interplay of that glory, the most basic game of all time which even kids understand: gift and reflection of gift - which is seen also in Matthew 7:2, Matthew 6:12, and Luke 6:37-38. Here is the key thing though:
+
+We are to glorify God through ourselves, not glorify ourselves through "God".
+
+One more time for those in the back:
+
+We are to glorify God through ourselves, not glorify ourselves through "God".
+
+Not to glorify ourselves by means of fasting or almsgiving or bigger ministries or what have you - but to glorify God and to make His name known amongst all nations, not to make our name known by means of his magic formulas and philosophical principles and cheat codes that he laid out. No. This is what delineates the machinae ex Deo from the deus ex machina: the machinery of God points back to Him; the machinery trying to build or become God, points back to itself in hopes of glorification.
+
+This is the role of the kingdom; to glorify God in all things!
+
+And you - who was purchased for God with blood - were made to be a kingdom, and to reign over the earth.
+
+If you are to turn wrenches, write code, design rocket ships, or any other technological endeavor - this is why you are to do so: to serve God by building up a kingdom and reigning over the earth. Maybe it's indirect, but this is why you were to do so. Maybe your how isn't living up to that why - maybe it's even sabotaging that why.
+
+We need to use our technology to build the Kingdom - a kingdom which of course is not of this world (John 18:36), but one which will not be destroyed (Daniel 2:44) - and we are that kingdom (Revelation 5:10)!
+
+This is why, folks, I'm building up a community of Catholic makers. I'd like to invite you to our Machinae Ex Deo (that name might change) server: 
+
+We will be conducting 

Archive/Blog Drafts/MED - Control of Power.md

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+Levels
+- Men
+- Horses
+- Saddles
+> The more important [invention] was the saddle, which arrived in the West as a barbarian innovation in the first century after Christ, and which gradually replaced the older horse-blanket and riding cushions. The saddle, with its rigid frame, although it did not add to a rider's lateral stability (a presupposition of mounted shock combat), nevertheless helped to prevent him from falling over his horse's tail.
+> Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn Townsend White
+- External Combustion
+- Internal Combustion
+- Automatic Transmissions
+- Electric Vehicles`
+- Self-driving vehicles
+
+The trend is away from 'relational' and towards 'transactional'.
+If you reject the good you were given, a void is created and you seek to fill the void
+

Archive/Blog Drafts/MED - Tools vs Machines.md

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+The circles that talk about machines, economics, and politics in light of the gospels often find themselves making a distinction between "tools" and "machines", which is a very good distinction. There's often a connotation that "tools" are good whereas "machines" are evil.
+
+<E.F. Schumacher quote from SIB>
+
+At the end of the day, what is important is not so much being able to identify tools and machines, but the attributes that make something tool-like and something machine-like.
+
+Let's begin by comparing two pieces of technology: the broom (obviously a tool) and the roomba (obviously a machine).
+
+### Aspect 0: Comprehensibility
+Brooms make sense - they have a handle you push and bristles which conform to a surface to push debris. Tools are simple and understandable in their full by seeing them being used. A hammer is swung, and it makes contact with a nail. This is better than the person trying to push on the nail because it allows them to store up a bit of energy in the swing before releasing it quickly in the strike with the nail. Tools may not be completely *appreciated* upon first glance (particular angles and techniques required to use them may not be obvious) but the basic principle of the tool **is**.
+
+The broom does still require practice to use well, as do most tools. However, this practice can be experiential and through use of the tool. Every proper use or mis-use of a tool, with attentiveness, gives one insights into the physics of the universe. Tools allow their operators engagement with the numinous nature of reality.
+
+The Roomba does not present itself in this way - Machines are difficult, even impossible to understand in their workings. One needs to peel layers off of them and devote serious amounts of study to begin understanding them. This study is study - and not practice.
+
+The Roomba also does not require practice to use, and repeatedly pushing the button on it to begin its operation does not help one understand its operation better. One does not come to understanding of the machine through its use, but only through study (and perhaps maintenance).
+
+> Tools are simple and understandable.
+> Machines are complicated and opaque.
+
+### Aspect 1: Fuel
+A broom does not need any power aside from that the operator supplies by pushing it. Tools may _transform_ energy, as bellows transform the mechanical energy a blacksmith puts in into the kinetic energy of the air flowing out. A knife concentrates force into a razor-thin area, creating pressures high enough to cut through material. Other tools may store energy that was put in by the operator - take a crossbow for instance, drawn back by a hunter before being latched in place, in the future to be released to propel a projectile.
+
+A roomba needs power from the electrical grid. The machine has its own power, and usually must be recharged (or given continuous shore power) from a fuel. Cars need gasoline to fill up its tank.
+
+> Tools take energy directly from their operators.
+> Machines must be provided a fuel.
+
+### Aspect 2: Use Case
+A roomba has very only one well-suited function: to clean tiny things off of house floors. A planter is only good for planting seeds. Machines are single-purpose and specialized.
+
+A broom has multiple uses: to sweep away items (big or small) from house floors, a paddling stick for disobedient children or robbers, sweeping walls and cobwebs, smoothing or texturing concrete, cleaning air vents, or cleaning out a grain bin. Tools, since they operate in the context of other systems and are "reconfigured" without thought, are inherently capable of performing a greater variety of tasks. Most of the functions of a "multitool" like a Leatherman are performed by just one of the tools: the knife. 
+
+> Machines are single-purpose and specialized.
+> Tools are multi-purpose, even undiscovered ones.
+
+### Aspect 3: Capital vs. Labor
+
+
+> Machines require heavy capital outlays and investment in hopes of long-term payoffs
+> Tools allow immediate use but require more labor
+
+
+### 
+“Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”

Archive/Blog Drafts/MED EP4 Keynotes.md

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+36:00 - 37:00: Familial Structure of reality / eating the fruit too soon
+37:00 - 37:35: Rushing shipping
+
+37:40 - 38:05: Knowing something
+
+39:00 - 39:28 / 39:48-40:00: understanding a topic through teaching
+40:50 - 41:28: By Adam putting in work, did he learn more about God's Creation?
+
+43:18 - 43:36: separating wheat from chaff
+43:45 - 45:20: Frugivores
+47:00 - 48:18: Experiential and analytical thinking
+
+

Archive/Blog Drafts/NEEDS EDIT - TRANSCENDENCE AND WORK.md

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+[INTRO]
+
+[PEOPLE WALKING INTO THE WORKSHOP]
+
+This son of God has a complicated relationship with work.
+
+He loves it.
+
+He hates it.
+
+It's his primary means by which he exercises dominion over the world. Well, that's really what the work is. Exercising his dominion over the world. Only humans can work - can take the form of matter that exists and put it on a new path.
+
+[THAD WORKING AT HIS COMPUTER IN A COMFY CHAIR]
+
+This son of God is an engineer. He usually exercises his dominion with the aid of technological apparatuses which amplify his powers. Writing a program, or designing something in CAD, are seeds he make that have exponential output. He feels extreme dominion in this way. The tools are just so powerful. Godlike.
+
+[SHOP OVERVIEW]
+
+But today, he's with a dozen other men, cutting timbers by hand.
+Ripping the fibers of oak with sharp metal with blood and sweat. No electricity here.
+
+[PANNING OVER TOOLS]
+
+That doesn't mean no technology. The saws are technology. Even this type of framing is an american invention, facilitated by rulers and squares. It didn't exist before the 19th century. This drill is definitely technology.
+
+[WORKING]
+
+But this technology requires toil. Toil that the desk job doesn't require. At least, the desk job requires *cerebral* toil. Maybe emotional toil. This framing, though, requires all of it. Especially with this oak. Cursed red oak. It splinters. It doesn't crosscut nicely. It dulls the chisels. It smells.
+
+Well, the smell is kinda nice. But weird.
+
+Why? - Why this toil?
+
+[OPENING BIBLE / CLOSEUP OF THE WORD - GENESIS 2:15]
+
+> The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
+
+Cultivate. Serve. Work.
+
+[TURNING THE PAGE - GENESIS 3:17]
+
+This happens before the fall. To work it and take care of it. In paradise - in the garden. Work. We forget this, but we do surely know that:
+
+> Cursed is the ground because of you;  
+    through painful toil you will eat food from it  
+    all the days of your life.
+
+[WORKING]
+
+He knows why the work. Or he thinks he knows why the work. He's building a frame. A frame that someone will use to make a cabin. This makes sense. He's cultivating the wood into a cabin. He's transforming it - literally altering the form of reality around him. He's rerouting it. 
+[RUNNING THE MILLERS FALLS DRILL]
+
+This is good to him. He's here to serve.
+
+And as he runs this drill to cut mortises, which he has to finish by hand with a chisel, the other students are using a chain mortiser.
+
+[RUNNING THE CHAIN MORTISER]
+
+He knows that it's faster. It makes square holes. The corners are the most irritating part of cutting the mortise. But he remembers the why is bigger.
+
+[WORKING - TIMELAPSE]
+
+The work is for him.
+
+We forget this oftentimes. Until we're confronted with boredom - a rarity in our modern culture where amusement is a flip of the phone away. Work is for man, not man for work. This work is here so that he may build his muscles. So that he may better understand his muscles. And his chisel. And the wood. The tree. How the wood splits when he holds the chisel flatter. Or steeper. Or hits it with a mallet. How knots affect the flow of the grain - and the resulting strength of the structure. His instructor is teaching him this, yes, but principally, it is the work that is teaching him. His instructor is more of a sherpa -a guide. His instructor can say all he wants, and this man can listen as attentively as he can, but it makes no difference until his chisel in his hand touches wood - this is where the learning begins; in the work.
+
+[CLOSEUP WORKING]
+
+This work is, quite literally, a gift from God so that he may understand Him. All work is. A part of his pedagogy. The lessons are different each day. Sometimes they're actually about the wood. But often they're about himself: he lacks attentiveness. Fortitude. Temperance. He wants to chisel quickly, but this means he takes too much out of the housing in spots.
+
+Yes, the chain mortiser would be faster. But he would have to upkeep and sharpen it. And deal with the extension cords. If it breaks, he'd be dependent on getting specialized parts from the manufacturer who might not be in business ten years from now. There are practical objective concerns - and subjective ones too. He would have less occasion to exercise his muscles. He would be inclined to disregard the grain of the wood, to rely on a well-constructed apparatus capable of chewing through material without discrimination.
+
+The engineer brain is kicking in, seeing this sit-on, arm-powered drill and an electric chain mortiser - is there perhaps a new permutation of these characteristics? A hand-powered chain mortiser? Or, perhaps, to simply use a mortising chisel on the drill? Have people done this before? [CLOSEUP OF MAKITA BRANDNAME] Can he make something new which resolves this tension between the dependency on special parts and equipment from a manufacturer far far away, and the productivity they offer?
+
+The engineer brain has stumbled upon something.
+
+[DRAWING A NEW DESIGN - SLOW ZOOM OUT]
+
+It stumbles upon an opportunity - for TRANSCENDENCE. An opportunity for BOTH-AND. Toil and efficiency! Productivity and understanding! The limited conventional wisdom of men would say that we must choose to be productive or choose to come into deeper relationship with our work - but that is only if we refuse to exercise dominion over our technological landscape, and instead simply accept the false dichotomies we are given.

Archive/Blog Drafts/NEEDS FINISHED - WORK AS HUMAN FORMATION.md

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+Thesis:
+Surprise: 
+
+[Van Neistat, "I Spent 1600 hours typing others books..."]
+
+"find the thing that will pay you the most money for the skills you have, forget finding your passion... real life is going to hit you."
+
+[Fade to black]
+
+[Video of Thad]
+
+I love you, Van. But no. That's not what work is for. 
+
+Yes, it's to provide the material things we need. But it also works on us. And you go on to say that your life's work might be something else than your career... which might be true. BUT...
+
+[Quote block with Schumacher]
+
+"It is work which occupies most of the energies of the human race, and what people actually do is normally more important, for understanding them, than what they say, or what they spend their money on, or what they own, or how they vote. A person's work is undoubtedly one of the most decisive formative influences on his character and personality."
+
+Earn all the money you want and bring it home to your wife and kids. But you're bringing yourself home, too. Are you bringing home your best self? Is your work making you better or worse equipped for when you do these non-career things?
+
+There is no work-life balance. Work forms the life.
+
+The subject-object divide is a farce. In all actions, the subject is worked on just as the object is.
+
+As we drove chisels into these timbers, forming them into something new, we were being formed as well. And a lot of us could feel it at the end of the day.
+
+[Closeup of hand opening and closing]
+
+And no, I don't just mean because we woke up with trigger finger, or sore necks.
+
+Our work on these timbers was what made us more capable craftsmen.
+
+[Adam explaining things]
+
+The words of our instructor Adam, great as he was, were only the seeds which needed our laborious practice to germinate into actual competency and skill, and perhaps even virtue.
+
+[Epiphanic sound effect]
+
+Yes, virtue. Real virtue. The type that isn't just "I read about this and now I think I understand."  The kind that's more lived than it is spoken of.
+
+Every paring with a chisel builds attentiveness. The final push to complete timbers builds fortitude. Seeing someone more skilled than you do something you actually tried your hand at builds humility and reverence.
+
+And there are the opportunities in the work where we can choose to practice a virtue or vise. Do I leave my workspace clean or messy? Am I friendly or rude to my co-workers? Do I offer advice and correction, or hoard knowledge?
+
+This question of what work does to us is hardly asked. And if it is, it is rarely taken seriously. Well, maybe OSHA will step in if we're doing something that's clearly dangerous to body. But what about work that is perilous to our souls?
+

Archive/Blog Drafts/RTUE_review.md

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+# The Right to Useful Unemployment
+
+Those two words give pause to the typical American mind: what could even be meant by useful unemployment? We know what self-employment is - that American dream. But what would useful unemployment look like?
+
+Ivan Illich begins his analysis with the market society we live in today.
+
+# The Market Society
+
+	In only a few decades, the world has become an amalgam. Human responses to everyday occurrences have been standardized. Though languages and gods still appear to be different, people daily join the stupendous majority who march to the very same megamachine. The light switch by the door has replaced the dozens of ways in which fires, candles and lanterns were formerly kindled.
+
+But it is not merely that the typical mode of existing has converged, but:
+
+	Light that does not flow from high-voltage networks and hygiene without tissue paper spell poverty for ever more people.
+
+Not that more people use non-electrified light - but that we see non-electrified light as a sign of poverty. The things of self-dependence, the signs of life, are now looked down upon by the industrial machine.
+
+	True, more babies get cow's milk, but the breasts of both rich and poor dry up. The addicted consumer is born when the baby cries for the bottle: the the organism is trained to reach for milk from the grocer and to turn away from the breast that thus defaults.
+
+What does this difference between the mother's breast and the grocer entail? At its core is a trade: sacrifice relationship for security. The mother's breast is not always there or ready. But the grocer is, or aims to be. However the quality suffers - as we know breastmilk in particular has certain nutrients and other qualities that make it better suited for nursing. The cow cannot compete on quality - especially when the industrial apparatus required to maintain the cow entails killing off the probiotics in the milk - literally killing the culture.
+
+This obsession with outsourcing is a strange new movement.
+
+	All through history, the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased. In good times, most families got most of their nutrition from what they grew or acquired in a network of gift relationships.
+
+By such historic standards, we are in the worst of times.
+
+And the rich seem to agree - as we see an increasing desire among some with money to homestead and life off-grid. I don't mean that their desire is wrong, but only to exemplify Illich's words:
+
+	The toil and pleasure of the human condition become a faddish privilege restricted to some of the rich. 
+
+Why? Why is it more expensive now than ever to be a peasant? Why is it so difficult now to engage in traditional modes of being?
+
+	On the day Venezuela legislated the right of each citizen to 'housing', conceived of as a commodity, three-quarters of all families found that their self-build dwellings were thereby degraded to the status of hovels. Furthermore - and this is the rub - self-building was now prejudiced. No house could be legally started without the submission of an approved architect's plan. The useful refuse and junk of Caracus, up until then re-employed as excellent building materials, now created a problem of solid-waste disposal. The man who produces his own 'housing' is looked down upon as a deviant who refuses to cooperate with the local pressure group for the delivery of mass-produced housing units.
+
+The war on poverty, instead of lifting people up economic rungs, has succeeded only in cutting off the lower rungs and leaving them as polluting rubbish, outlawed to be welded back onto the ladder.
+
+The bottom rungs are instead replaced by gatekeeping professions.
+
+# Disabling Professions
+
+The credibility of the professional expert, be he scientist, therapist, or executive, is the Achilles' heel of the industrial system. Therefore, only those citizen initiatives and radical technologies that directly challenge the insinuating dominance of disabling professions open the way to freedom for non-hierarchical, community-based competence.
+
+Here, Illich has a strong anarchist streak - one which I track with for a while, but only to a point. He makes the comparison to clergy, in a critical way. I think this comparison is apt, but Illich seems to be unable to distinguish between the clergy operating normally and properly and the clergy as they were accused (and often were) leading up to the Protestant reformation. Illich would be well to walk the line better here - and I hope to write about this in more depth soon.
+
+The critique he offers of professionals as we have come to know them is damning - worse than the 'oldest profession':
+
+	Merchants sell you the goods they stock. Guildsmen guaruntee quality. Some craftspeople tailor their product to your measure or fancy. Professionals however, tell you what you need. They claim the power to prescribe. They not only advertise what is good, but ordain what is right.
+
+The modern professional not only ostracises us from domains we would normally be competent in, but then tells us to what degree we need their products - utterly removing us from their domain of so-called competence. We lose even the ability to develop and identify our own needs.
+
+As time goes on, our understanding of the professions condenses and procedures get simplified. Rather than giving this revelation to the people, the professional even gets condensed down into the clipboard warrior:
+
+	As pharmacological technique - tests and drugs - became so predictable and cheap that one could have dispensed with the physician, society enacted laws and police regulations to restrict the free use of those procedures had simplified, and placed them on the prescription list.
+
+	Just twenty years ago, it was a sign of normal health - which was assumed to be good - to get along without a doctor... To be plugged into a professional system as a life-long client is no longer a stigma that sets apart the disabled person from citizens at large.
+
+# Demolishing Illusions
+
+The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services.
+
+	[...]
+
+	The illusion that economic models can ignore use-values springs from the assumption that those activities which we designate by intransitive verbs can be indefinitely replaced by institutionally defined staples referred to as nouns: 'education' substituted for 'I learn'; 'health care' for 'I heal'; transportation for 'I move'; 'television' for 'I play'.
+
+Change begins with us - we need to use the right language. I don't need "healthcare" per se, I need to heal - something that I must do; no mechanistic apparatus can possibly eliminate the work that I put in. I don't need food, I need to eat - I must ultimately put fork in mouth. We can begin by acknowledging the ultimate use-values of things and putting them as primary, working back from there - rather than implicitly advocating for the technocratic apparatus.
+
+The second sort of illusion is that all tools are basically of the same sort.
+
+	Throughout history... most work was done to create use-values not destined for exchange. But technological progress has been consistently applied to develop a very different kind of tool: it has pressed the tool primarily into the production of marketable staples... Now women or men, who have come to depend almost entirely on deliveries of standardized fragments produced by tools operated by anonymous others, have ceased to find the same direct satisfaction in the use of tools that stimulated the evolution of man and his cultures.
+
+Tools are formative on their users - and so different tools produce different people. Rapidly evolving tools alienate us even from the culture we inherit. Hammers, sickles, plows, squares - these had a meaning that was understood through direct experience with their usage. Now, we know their meaning only through secondhand accounts. The effects that this has on us as a culture are difficult to comprehend; they require levels of meta-cognition spanning across generations.
+
+	The central planning of output-optimal decentralization has become the most prestigious job of the late seventies. But what is not yet recognized is that this new illusory salvation by professionally decreed limits confuses liberties and rights.
+
+
+What's a liberty, and what's a right? Per Illich:
+
+	Liberties protect use-values as rights protect the access to commodities.
+
+One may have a liberty to milk the family cow - but the logic of state welfare would say you have a right to milk. The right to clean, safe milk can get twisted against your liberty to milk a cow and sell the excess to your neighbor.
+
+
+In a section wonderfully titled "The self-critical hooker", Illich sees through the attempts at self-regulation that large corporations have taken.
+
+	Professional self-policing is useful principally in catching the grossly incompetent - the butcher or the outright charlatan. But as has been shown again and again, it only protects the inept and cements the dependence of the public on their services.
+
+The regulatory bodies thus formed seem to legitimize the reign of hegemonic entities. And Illich points out an unspoken and illegitimate right that has emerged:
+
+	The idea that professionals have a right to serve the public is thus of very recent origin. Their struggle to establish and legitimate this corporate right becomes one of our most oppressive social threats.
+
+
+Illich, though, for all his great structural critique still ends in a strange, tacked-on egalitarian stance:
+
+	A society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exercise of productive liberties cannot come into existence unless the commodities and resources on which the exercise of these liberties is based are equally distributed to all.
+
+# In Conclusion
+
+What is the way out? Note modernity and walk right by it:
+
+	A retooling of contemporary society with convivial rather than industrial tools implies ashift of emphasis in our struggle for sical justice; it implies a new kind of subordination of distributive to participatory justice. In an industrial society, individuals are trained for extreme specialization. They are rendered impotent to shape or to satisfy their own needs.
+
+We need to recognize over-professionalization as a problem in itself that needs addressing. This can be done not by committees placed on top that lessen the byproducts and harms, but by each individual person making a conscious effort to engage with reality: to utilize our rights to useful unemployment where we have them, and to expand their horizon.
+
+And this is an exciting and satisfying work - an adventure, even:
+
+	[reducing dependence on commodities] entails the adventure of imagining and constructing new frameworks in which individuals and communities can develop a new kind of modern toolkit. This would be organized so as to permit people to shape and satisfy an expanding proportion of their needs directly and personally.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Raul Botha.md

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+# Screening Questions
+
+So my recording guy Nathaniel and I want to do an interview with you. A lot of people start thinking about the theology of technology with media tech and evangelization but we've kinda deliberately not started there. But it's a very important thing we address!
+
+- Are you game for an interview?
+
+- Tell me a bit about yourself in general - married? kids? parish?
+- Could you briefly explain how you got to where you are now?
+- What kind of duties do you have in the Diocese?
+- What aspects of faith & technology do you find inspiring/interesting/important?
+- What are some of the challenges you face in your position?
+
+- What times / availability do you have?
+- We can come to you, or we've been doing our recording out of the Manchester Makerspace in the downtown.
+
+# The interview - notes
+- He's also a jack of all trades in the creative realm. Has a background in literature, theater, film, an MBA, theology, and math/CS even.
+- He wrote a paper titled "Catholicism and New Media" https://collected.jcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=mastersessays
+	- The vatican had the first TV, Radio broadcast, etc.
+	- We've had scribes, astronomers before that
+	- The Church has historically always been at the edge, and now, to some degree, we're behind the curve.
+- His past (resume/linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raul-botha-b1363244/ )
+  - Started doing IT for the Romanian Catholic Dioscese (Of Canton, OH... but this is a tiny byzantine dioscese that is actually the entirety of north america)
+  - Moved into doing pretty much everything for the dioscese
+- Really likes to view things in the realm of story - narrative and history; how do we bring history into the now?
+- Sees great opportunity in phones in that all you need now is a phone, so these are exciting times; you can do what once took the work of 30 people with one or two people
+- Really loves underdog stories, and now, the church is the underdog.
+- The biggest challenge he's realizing though is that you can't do it all yourself.
+- He's started questioning: what's the legacy he's leaving behind?
+	- You can't take the learning you gain with you
+	- You have to give up what you're given and share it
+	- You can make videos all day long... but if today's the last day, so what?
+- Long-term dream is to build a sort of 'academy' to teach and foster catholic content creators
+- Book recommendation: iGods (https://www.amazon.com/iGods-Technology-Shapes-Spiritual-Social/dp/1587433443)
+- He's a romanian, and was 5 when the communist regime collapsed.
+
+# My Questions
+[Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13OOAy6yrPV8lNMxAVQzqRfs8yNhjhlUSPakLIMvM0p8/edit)

Archive/Blog Drafts/Sharpening.md

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+There's an old story I love, a story of two woodcutters.
+
+> One morning, they decided to test each other as to who could chop more wood. They got to chopping as fast as possible. This went for an hour before the first cutter stopped, and the second one kept cutting, emboldened by thinking that the first was exhausted. Fifteen minutes pass and the first cutter resumed working - only to stop an hour later. This goes on until the end of the day - and the second cutter was sure he had won. He had worked nonstop, after all!
+> 
+> But, the first cutter - who had paused every hour - won handily. "How is this possible?" The first asked.
+> 
+> "Well, it's simple. While you were chopping wood with a dull axe, I was sharpening mine."
+
+So it is in our lives - it's easy to get hung up on plowing through our day, when in reality, stepping back and spending a little bit of time not directly on the task, but sharpening our axe in preparation for the work ahead of us.
+
+As a little exercise, go take a knife and rub it straight on a rock for a while to make sure it’s good and dull. Try to cut a piece of fruit. Note how not only is this difficult, but with a delicate thing like fruit, you end up smashing it. Then, sharpen the knife. This might take a while, especially if you have the wrong tools (your sharpening tools… need sharpened). But then, slice easily through the fruit. How much effort is alleviated! How much better the result! How much less waste! Now imagine if you had to cut hundreds of such pieces. It pays to sharpen.
+
+So it is in all parts of our life, especially the spiritual. If we are grinding through our days without taking a step back to recollect, we will continue to grind ourselves down.
+
+In a throwaway culture, it’s difficult to remember that sharpening doesn’t take much effort, and is actually enjoyable.
+
+Take the ten minutes. Pray the liturgy of the hours. Organize your to-do list. Tweak your CAD software hotkeys. Sharpen your axe, chisel, saw, drillbit, or pencil. You owe it to yourself and those you work with to use sharp tools - not just work hard with them.
+
+Sharpening is not lazy. It is still work. It takes effort and attention to do so well. But it is crucial.
+
+#### Future articles
+- Bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP1AmDRhoas
+- Oversharpening
+- Pivoting

Archive/Blog Drafts/Significant Elements.md

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+www.historicithica.org
+www.significantelements.org
+
+	 

Archive/Blog Drafts/Subsidiarity 101.md

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+# Subsidiarity
+
+"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them" - Pope Pius XI, Quadragessimo Anno
+
+Put briefly, the principle of subsidiarity is that problems should be solved at lower levels rather than higher ones. This isn't a matter of utility - that letting lower levels solve things tends to be more efficient, or robust - but a matter of justice.
+
+Consider the language that Pius uses: "to take from individuals what they can accomplish". Pius is not referring so much to the fruits of labor, but the labor itself. Perhaps when we are burdened, we appreciate someone lending us a hand, but we do not appreciate someone denying us the ability to stretch our faculties.
+
+We would rather drive our own car; we would rather cook our own food; for to work and exercise dominion over the world is a pleasure and a joy. It is a natural desire for self-governance, and it is fitting that man should seek to govern himself by the cardinal virtues.
+
+What does this have to do with technological design?
+
+We need to respect the owners and users of technology - let them be true owners and users coming into a harmonious and understanding relationship with technology.
+
+Tools, machines, and devices should be servicable by the end user. Phone batteries should be replaceable. Oil should be easily changeable. Manuals should be provided, yes - but even better is to design such that function is transparent and a manual is moot. Necessitating tasks be given to "licensed professionals" should be avoided.
+
+Software and hardware should be open to extension and modification. Perhaps a piece of software doesn't produce output in quite the right format - if open source, it can be reconfigured by the user to solve the problem at hand. Hardware should be designed with openness towards the possibility of repurposing by the end user - using flat bolted connections over curves and snapfits.
+
+Prudence is necessary, of course, to determine when a higher level of governance or design is truly needed - because there are such cases.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Switching.md

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+Switching between different tasks is expensive. In our modern world where transportation (and thus transportation between different tasks), there is an illusion that we have cut these costs, thus making switching frequently viable.
+
+Analyzing work from an instrumental standpoint in this way ignores that work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity (as JPII says). What does high-switching work do to a person?
+
+St. Theophan the Recluse writes:
+
+> "Do not run quickly from one thought to another. This will sooner scatter your thoughts than gather them and influence the soul. The sun would not warm even one creature on earth if it were to run across it instantly. May the measure of reasoning about one thing or another be sympathy. Bring every thought into feeling and do not let it go until it penetrates the heart."
+
+Work, too, should penetrate the heart of man. When man is immersed in a work for an extended period of time, it affects him and draws him into something.
+
+When jostling about from thing to thing (or into work and out of it), you are deprived of the possibility for contemplation in work.
+
+Fight this, and create stillness in your work today.
+
+Turn off notifications - those things that pull you away from depth in work over banal things. Make set times for when you're going to check something.
+
+If you're going to do something, do all of it. If you have to cut lumber for a project, cut all the lumber. If you have to stain, do all the staining. Not only will this enable deeper contemplation and appreciation of your work, this will reduce the time spent on those hidden switching costs of moving around and cleaning up.

Archive/Blog Drafts/THE INTERCHANGEABLE AMERICAN.md

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+I'm not sure that the instructors have realized it, but the form of framing that we are learning is a uniquely american one. This is "square rule" timber framing. It's a very american thing - it builds on the european idea of "scribe rule" framing - the same style of mortises, tenons, sills, beams, posts... but it's in the spirit of liberalism.
+
+Yes, liberalism. I don't mean democrat or left-wing - I mean the spirit or philosophy that understands a human person fundamentally as an individual, not a part of a society.
+
+Blank-slate. Tabula rasa. Interchangeable.
+
+[STANDING OUTSIDE THE AMERICAN PRECISION MUSEUM]
+
+I'm standing outside the American Precision Museum, which was once the Robbins & Lawrence Armory, an early machine shop which proved the efficacy of the American system.

Archive/Blog Drafts/The Backburner.md

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+Downtime is inevitable. Or, as is the condition of modernity, you're in traffic. The question isn't really as much how to avoid idle time, but what to do with it.
+
+I was talking today with a dear friend about how I react when my plans fall through. My reaction is initial frustration, but then, joy. I dip into the backburner. I did that today - was going to help a friend with some stuff, but wound up honing my hand plane skills and doing some reading of Joel Salatin.
+
+These hiccups happen. You're in the shop and you break the last endmill that will work to machine your part. Tough. You could, I suppose, call up your local tool rep and drive an hour to get a new one. Or, get it on order via snail mail, and turn to something else.
+
+Or I'm designing a piece of equipment and a vendor isn't answering my phone calls, so I can't get the information to proceed on my design. I could either ballpark it (probably wrong), and have to re-do the work later. Or, I just put that part down and work on something else.
+
+(You may notice this 'chisel' works great in conjunction with a certain 'hammer' - we'll talk about that next time.)
+
+Whether it's [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/), [Pocket](https://getpocket.com/en/), a [bullet journal](https://bulletjournal.com/), or a list on a sticky note, we can develop a backburner of edifying things - things that are good to do, but don't have a due date (at least, not anytime soon).
+
+It matters what we fill our backburner with. We can load it up with inane things and vain pursuits, or with edifying things.
+
+> But as I told you before, it is simple: Just fill up your idle time with the Prayer.
+> I don't have idle time.
+> Look. You drive a car, don't you? While you do that, you can neither read nor solve mathematical puzzles. Use that time to recite the Jesus Prayer. Or, while you cook, wash the floor, wait at a bus stop, recite the prayer. If you get into the habit of filling up these empty time slots with the Jesus Prayer you will experience extraordinary benefits in your heart.
+
+We are called to redeem the time (Ephesians 5:16). Make the most of it. You will face roadblocks, waiting periods, and detours - will you take them with frustration, or with grace?

Archive/Blog Drafts/The Neccessity of Virtue.md

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+# The Necessity of Virtue
+
+Fulton Sheen commented thusly:
+
+> The Western mind knows the world better than it knows man, but the [Far] Eastern world knows man better than it knows the world. Our Western world can tame nature, the Eastern world learned to tame itself. The former is an extrovert and produces a technological civilization; the latter is an introvert and seeks to develop wisdom through contemplation. The Western world regards the head the localization of wisdom, but the Eastern world often makes it the navel.
+
+- Marc Barnes: Systems must require virtue
+

Archive/Blog Drafts/The Zone and Circumambulation.md

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+In order to actually produce something of artistic merit, you need to yield a certain amount of that process to the unconscious. If it's not spontaneous, if it's too over-determined by a conscious analytical process, it will fail. There has to be an unconscious movement towards the creation of something.
+- Christopher Mastopietro, https://youtu.be/o2IgD5cv9Vo?t=4168
+
+Artists and athletes make reference to _the zone_ a lot. It's a great place to be. It's almost like where the conscious subsides and allows the unconscious to do its work - similar to the analytical and propositional thinking I talked about yesterday. Being in the zone feels good, and is quite productive (or at least feels that way).
+
+What defines this unconscious takeover? Matthew Crawford writes:
+
+> These remarks highlight an important feature of those practices that entail skilled and active engagement: one's attention is focused on standards intrinsic to the practice, rather than external goals that may be won through the practice, typically, money or recognition.
+
+To bring the unconscious up requires an ignorance of the end goal... yet the ignorance of the goal is, in the moment, a requirement to achieve the goal.
+
+This is reflected in one formulation of an Act of Contrition which I adore:
+
+> O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell; but most of all because they offend Thee*, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life. Amen.
+
+The central motivator for repentence and true contrition is not, at its best, an external goal such as the gain of heaven or avoidance of hell. The best motivator is one that actually sinks into the unconscious.
+
+In design as well, to build good things, we need the principles to sink into our unconscious; principles such as extensibility or repairability cannot simply be lectured, thought of from time to time, or written in a requirements document. These principles need to become habits and then attitudes which are continually espoused in all things we design.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Things.md

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+
+# The Importance of Things
+
+(bolds/italics/etc to be added when going to substack)
+
+If you go on long enough asking why the world as we know it isn’t great, people push back at a certain point: "Why are you looking for meaning in everything? Can't you just pay your tithe, pray, and keep your head down? We're not meant to be happy in this world.
+
+Sure, things won’t be perfect in this life, but why accept mediocrity?
+
+Frankly, the world is glorious - as we discussed in our last episode on Numinosity (https://www.machinaeexdeo.com/p/ep3-numinosity-and-the-mystery-of), and it's not that we've disenchanted the world. We aren't bothering to immerse in the beauty of it as it's presented to us. 
+
+One needs only to look around at the new lies spreading about the reality of the world on a daily basis. But,
+
+> The lie cannot be defeated by a vacuity. It has to be defeated by truth. We have to immerse ourselves in things: trees, stars, mud, grouse, hay, stones, brooks, rain, dogs, fire; and the manmade things closest to the human hand and its work: hammer, shovel, paintbrush, wrench, wheel.
+> Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes
+
+We can’t just suck wrong ideas out of people’s heads and then put ‘right’ ones back in place which are just as liable to leave. We need to recognize the whole reality of the human person as created - from the Logos, yes, but first from clay, not from sheer information.
+
+ Information technology encroaches the modern world on all fronts. It is its defining aspect, and it is a degree separated from the divinely Created world: it is subcreation and as such, can be a lie obfuscating the reality of things.
+
+  
+
+> Things, in their beautiful and imposing integrity, do not easily bend to lies. A bull is a bull and not a cow. Grass is food for cattle but not for man. A warbler is alive but a rock is not. The three-hundred-pound stone will not move for a little child or a boy or a feminist professor. Water expands when it freezes and will break anything unless you allow for that. Things are what they are. They know no slogans, and they do not lie. And they give witness to the glory of God.
+
+> Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes
+
+  
+
+Things give witness to the glory of God, and we shouldn’t reject the things in favor of pure information or theory.
+
+The word was made flesh and dwelt among us. His was and is a relationship not of telepathy, but experience through created things.
+
+Our faith is incarnate and to deny this is heresy - gnosticism or nominalism. The things we do - the atoms we manipulate - have moral significance. In an era of vapid communication over bits and bytes, I think we often forget this. And what is more, interaction with things grounds us to the moral realities; the divine plan is written upon the heart of every man and into every subatomic particle if we are only attentive to it.
+
+  
+
+There is an absolute importance, then, that man maintain a degree of mastery over the world: to remember our inheritance as sons and daughters of the King. But to maintain this finite portion of an infinite inheritance, we must do finite things that are connected back to the infinite. We must perform particular duties at the service of God. Some of us (not all) need to fix motorbikes to grow in attentiveness, as one mechanic puts it:
+
+  
+
+> In diagnosing and fixing things made by others, one is confronted with obscurities, and must remain constantly open to the signs by which they reveal themselves. This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgements. This is easier said than done. Because the stochastic arts diagnose and fix things that are variable, complex and not of our own making, and therefore not fully knowable, they require a certain disposition toward the thing you are trying to fix. This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration. I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance in our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.
+
+> Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
+
+  
+
+One could conjecture, then, that all productive pursuits allow us to grow in virtue. This is true along with the converse - that pursuits are productive so long as they allow us to grow in virtue. Development of virtue points to productivity (even if indirect) and vice versa.
+
+  
+
+If we find ourselves in a position where we can be productive, we can find a path to virtue.
+
+  
+
+Sometimes, the road is unclear though - when the road is covered by lies. Lies are stories we make up to obscure something (as opposed to a story we make up to illuminate something, even if the way it is illuminated is by the form of a veil). When something is obscured, it is difficult to engage with it. When we make things difficult to engage with (for no good reason), we make it difficult to initiate apprentices. In an age where we have fewer masters by which youngsters may be initiated into the arts and must do so themselves, we need less layers of abstraction and lies, not more.
+
+  
+
+This, by the way, is why I have somewhat of a moral apprehension to paint. I'm not a hardliner - painting drywall isn't a sin, and putting a good protective coat over your handrail is good sense, but paint over mahogany is downright reprehensible. It's ugly, messy, expensive, and it decries the beauty of Created things in favor of blue-shifted-grey latex paint.
+
+  
+
+Correct interaction with things gives us the ability to develop all the virtues necessary to be subcreators without losing sight and respect of the immense power of Creation - we must still be obedient to Him at the end (as Christ was on the cross).
+
+  
+
+> One can't be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one's fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician's power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from a prior submission... her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically... [which] do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them.
+
+> Matthew Cradford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
+
+  
+
+... and these natural necessities of music answer to the divine will. Again, a bull is a bull and not a cow - if you castrate it, it doesn't become a cow, but a steer. Proficient engagement with Things reminds us that there are certain fixed limits which are not to be passed, but that within that, there is still freedom. It allows us to be simultaneous master and slave - as our Lord Himself was.
+
+  
+
+> I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he's got mercy, only it's such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment.
+
+> Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
+
+  
+
+Actual physical things remind us that God's ways are not our own and we are sojourners here. We must remain immersed in Things.
+
+**

Archive/Blog Drafts/We Are Still Doing Alchemy.md

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+# We are still doing Alchemy.
+
+We think of ourselves as an ennobled, scientific, higher-minded populace. We look back at alchemists, and yet - we are doing the same fundamental thing they were.

Archive/Blog Drafts/Why We Drive.md

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+# Why We Drive - 
+
+# Pt 1: Flourishing
+
+Matthew Crawford, author of a few great titles including Shop Class as Soulcraft, wrote a book back in 2020 that's just excellent, and right for the time we are in: Why We Drive. I could probably read through this a number of different ways but I am fascinated by a certain train (or perhaps road) of thought - let's get going.
+
+(All quotations are from Why We Drive)
+
+We are in a unique spot with automobiles, entering the very real possibility of self-driving cars on the road in a serious way. Crawford is pausing and asking: why do this? He isn't asking so much why we move from place to place, but rather, why do we do the driving rather than outsource it? Is it just because we haven't gotten there yet, or perhaps, there are real goods that the car as we know it (or knew it) provide us.
+
+Crawford strikes right at the heart. This isn't a book about the numbers or feasibility of automation. He is asking if automation is a noble end. Crawford seems to think that cars help our spirits live - not just our bodies.
+
+	But remember, all rats die. Not every rat lives.
+
+The goal we are after is not continued existence - but flourishing.
+
+	Flourishing - that of rats and humans alike - seems to require an environment with "open problem spaces" that elicit the kinds of bodily and mental engagement bequeathed us by evolution and cultural development.
+
+The road as we know it - as opposed to rails or self-driving cars - can be such an open problem space:
+
+	When the traffic lights go out during a storm, it sometimes feels like waking up from a long slumber. We realize that we can work things out for ourselves, with a little faith in one another. Recall that Pope Francis called the prudent drivers of Rome, who "express concretely their love for the city" by moving through it with tact and care, "artisans of the common good." The common good may be understood in this way, as something enacted by particular people who are fully awake. Alternatively, it may be understood as something to be achieved by engineering herd behavior without our awareness, in such a way that prudence and other traits of character are rendered moot. Our role will be to step out of the way gracefully, and in this way help "optimize the output of large tools for lifeless people," as Ivan Illich wrote.
+
+Crawford again echoes here that the development of virtue is not something we can enact or force with technology. It is only something we can provide the soil for which it to take root and grow in.
+
+	In the Aristotelian perspective as elaborated by William Hasselberger, virtue doesn't consist of a collection of true propositions that can be combined with circumstantial detail and entered into a moral calculus, to be solved by the application of universal principles, yielding an output consisting of the right action. Virtue is more like a skill, acquired through long practice in the art of living.
+
+Life - true life of virtue - is risky.
+
+The openness of the problem space is opened really when we remove the traffic lights and stop signs, or when we operate equipment more at the limits. Crawford at points even proposes interesting alternative policies: could we have graduated drivers licenses, where how fast you are allowed to go is determined by how proficient you are at driving? The rules of the road have already sacrificed some of the open problem space for flourishing at the technocrats' altar of security.
+
+Crawford recounts many stories of men's (and women's) interactions with machines - mostly inspiring. But he closes with a beautiful one:
+
+	It was a slalom through the redwoods, dappled sunlight playing on perfect black tarmac as I came hard out of a corner, front wheel lifting off the ground. On this stretch of road, there are several serpentine sections where you can see, in a single take, a series of three corners ahead in their entirety, with nowhere for surprises to hide. These chicanes have a bodily rhythm to them that is sublime, when taken at speed. I have never been a good athlete, and can only admire those who move with natural grace. But on a sport bike on a canyon road, for a brief spell I feel raised up from my God-given mediocrity. By a machine! What a miracle.
+
+I think that Crawford sells this short at the end - because the mastery on display is not like that of an athelete: it is that of an athlete. And I think it is even unfair to say that he is lifted by a machine - rather, he elevates the machine into such a beautiful display. This is obvious - the bike does nothing of its own volition. It needs a driver. This creates a relationship between him and the bike that is sublime.
+
+Rollercoasters are neat, but they have nothing on road vehicles. A passenger and driver may experience the same G-forces, but the relationship they have to them is wholly different.
+
+	To drive is to exercise one's skill at being free.
+
+# Pt 2: Feel and Direct Connection
+
+(Continuation of a review of Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive. Read Part 1 here.)
+
+Cars have gotten a lot more high-tech in the past century. Is that all good? Does that help us to be free? Crawford sees some problems:
+
+	Such minders [as antilock brakes and electronic stability control] can save you in a panic situation, but they also have a slight deskilling effect. They prevent a driver from learning the behavior of his car at the limits of traction, and how the car's chassis dynamics can be made to work for him or against him in the timing and modulation of steering and brake inputs.
+
+When we don't exercise our muscles, they atrophy. If we let ABS and ESC take care of knowing our car's limits - we cease to upkeep our understanding of the limits. Sure, the engineer might know intellectually the calculations - but he has no feel. And the expert driver who gets into a car with ABS and ESC - feels that there is something wrong. Crawford talks about his experience driving an Audi RS3:
+	
+	It took my shift commands as a general statement of mood, a request to be given due consideration when the committee next convenes. The car never spoke rudely to me of being wrong, as when I nearly rolled my 1963 Beetle. It was more like "Your opinion is important to us".
+
+The virtue of feel - perhaps there is a better more technically precise word - is one that modern technology seeks to wipe out. At times this is inadvertent. At times it is misunderstood. If you have driven a car - especially a racecar - without power steering, you'll understand. There is no simulated feedback that could replace what you feel through the steering wheel. Skilled users of tools are doing something fundamentally different than someone pushing a button on a machine.
+
+	An expert hockey player's attention isn't directed to his stick, it is directed *through* his stick to the puck, just as a piano player's attention is directed not to his fingers, nor even to the intrument's keys, but to the notes he is playing. A real "driver's car" is one that accomplishes a similar disappearing act, becoming a transparent two-way conduit of information and intention. But there is a tension between this ideal and the trend to introduce ever more layers of electronic mediation between driver and road.
+
+This distinction is important - the good tool (if we are interested in developing the virtue of feel) is not necessarially more effecacious: it is just more transparent! It provides more direct access to feedback and more opportunities for input. The good tool has fewer layers - not more!
+
+When we add more layers, we have to start adding feedback - artificial feedback.
+
+	Often what [ABS, throttle/brake by wire, etc.] amounts to is a genuine poverty of information reaching the driver, and filter between intention and execution. What's more, an overzealous damping out of mechanical "transients" has made it necessary for the car to keep us informed by other means, rather than by the seat of the pants.
+
+When there is a filter between intention and execution, the driver may not be aware of their harsh or extreme inputs. They might shake a steering wheel or mash the throttle in such a way that on a more barebones car would cause both feedback (harsh accelerations) but potentially even damage. The driver is unaware of this, though, and is deprived of the chance to refine their feel.
+
+The growing size of automobiles also is a form of this filter, removing us from the effects of poor decision-making.
+
+	From my own unscientific observation, I have been struck by the inadequate following distances often maintained by a driver in a typical six-thousand-pound SUV. As though the possibility of bodily harm were a pure abstraction.
+
+All of these innovations are to make cars safer, but aren't we fighting 'distracted driving'? If this is so, perhaps there is a different way toward safety:
+
+	Going forward, the design principle that could help us mitigate distracted driving, and recover the joy of driving, would be one that exploits the sensori-motor capacities we have developed through human evolution.
+
+This is a great shift in direction from what the West, especially America, has been moving towards. I like to call this "couch culture": a shift away from the active and towards the consumptive.
+
+	In the affluent West, many of our energies of innovation seem to be channeled into creating experiences for the consumer that will make him feel good without making demands on him.
+
+But this is not why we drive.
+
+	The pleasure of driving is the pleasure of doing something; of being actively and skillfully engaged with a reality that pushes back against us. Only then do we feel the progress of our own mastery.
+
+# Pt 3: Automation's War on Virtue
+
+(Continuation of a review of Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive. Read Part 2 here.)
+
+Modern technology is opposed to the development of virtue.
+
+Machinery that humans operate has been moving away from manual gagues and towards automated alerts. While the manual gague, or even moreso, the seat of the pants, puts an imposition on the driver to pay attention, the automated alert does not - instead it invites us to have faith that the alarm will sound when there is a problem. But what if it doesn't? Then, the driver is thrust from their liesurely couch-sitting into a disaster where all the automation is falling apart.
+
+	Human factors research shows how making things too easy for people can backfire, because our "attentional capacity... shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload." This is especially worrying because it is hard to detect. The operator simply tunes out because he or she doesn't have enough to do. Further, when the driver (or pilot) is understimulated during routine operation, he is more likely to panic when overstimulated, as happens when dealing with a failure of the automation.
+
+As much as I think we get overstimulated by media, I think Crawford is absolutely onto something here. In productive endeavors, especially those that use the hands, we are chronically UNDER-stimulated.
+
+No wonder we want to watch TikTok while driving.
+
+The cars aren't fun anymore - and not just because we've gotten used to them - they demand less of us. Now, the Lord asks us to stay awake and keep watch. Is there a level of automation that encourages us to not do this?
+
+The virtue of alertness is one front, but there are others. Machine thinking despises prudence - it writes it right out.
+
+	If there is an overall lesson to be learned from the human factors literature, perhaps it is this: automation has a kind of totalizing logic to it. At each stage, remaining pockets of human judgement and discretion appear as bugs that need to be solved.
+
+And this becomes a political question as much as a technical one.
+
+	The contest for control between humans and computers often looks like no contest at all, as a political reality.
+
+We have conditioned ourselves to expect this!
+	
+	Wherever large groups asseble there is an imperative to control every aspect of the environment, and prescribe every move - every allowed use. Usually it is some private entity that does this, not the government. Worse, it becomes an unthought posture we adopt for ourselves, having been trained to think of ourselves as consumers of manufactured experiences rather than as rational creatures capable of dealing with the world in an unfiltered way.
+
+And of course the desire to not exercise virtue is one of laziness.
+
+This is a laziness that the technocrats of our time are well aware of. Eric Schmidt (of Google) told the Wall Street Journal:
+
+	"One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type... I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
+
+We want rest and freedom. Of course, true freedom is not to be found through faith in machines, but in development of virtue.
+
+	Qualities once prized, such as spiritedness and a capacity for independent judgement, are beginning to appear dysfunctional. If they are to operate optimally, our machines require deference. Perhaps what is required is an adaptation of the human spirit, to make it more smoothly compatible with a world that is to be run by a bureaucracy of machines. Or maybe we need to burn that house down.
+
+# Pt 4: A Better Way
+
+(Continuation of a review of Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive. Read Part 3 here.)
+
+I love Crawford because he isn't just a critic. All the way through, he's showing a positive way, typically through example of people on the margins: the rat-rodder, the offroad-racers, and the like. It's a revolutionary way, a way that goes against all our instincts, but it is a positive way!
+
+It begins with us - and reclaiming our place at the table in making decisions about the technology we use and develop. A habit that we Americans were once proud of - not 'liberty' but self-governance:
+	
+	"Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined." Thus did Tocqueville marvel at Americans' habit of self-government, and the temperament it both required and encouraged from a young age. "The same spirit," he said, "pervades every act of social life."
+
+We should act the same with our technology. When problems arise, we can look to ourselves first and our neighbor next to solve them. We need to exercise our muscles of self-governance once more and act as masters over our technology.
+
+And yes - look to your neighbor! Because:
+
+	Rules become more necessary as trust and solidarity decline in a society.
+
+If we want less rules and more self-governance, we need more trust and solidarity.
+
+All too often I hear people lament that their phones are too addicting or their cars are too fandangled. Maybe the perfect solution doesn't exist, but you are not at the unbridled mercy of manufacturers. Buy an old car and keep it running. Use an old flip phone. Buy a new car and rip out the television in the middle of it - heck, rip out the electronic throttle; replace the ECU! Take matters into your own hands. Tired of your laptop breaking? Buy an old ThinkPad and enjoy the ability to actually fix the thing.
+
+The revolution begins not with legislation but by changing your own oil.
+
+Technocrats get away with stuff because we let them. Real Americans don't stand for that. Real Christians are not of this world. We set our sights higher.
+
+What if we pursued automotive safety not by forcing safer cars but enabling safer drivers by making "driver's cars" - cars that are lightweight and have good responsiveness?
+
+	"The world is its own best model." This could be taken as the motto for a new direction in automotive design. To do so would be to accept the existence of two very separate classes of automobiles with different design criteria: driverless cars and driver's cars.
+
+It's worth noting that a driver's car isn't a Lamborghinni - it's more like a Honda Civic. A Civic built with advancements in metallurgy, fabrication, combustion, and other sciences - unencumbered by the weight of sensors, extra-wide bodies, and automatic transmissions. Such a car would not only enable its driver to grow in virtue but would have material benefits - it would be profoundly more fuel-efficient.
+
+I wouldn't advocate for such a law, but outlawing the sale of automatic transmissions could enable drivers to burn less fuel, cause less crashes, and spend less money, than Tier-4 emissions standards and backup cameras. But most importantly, think of the spiritual development!
+
+It certainly feels strange to talk about technology in terms of virtue rather than material but we have to, or we will find ourselves infantilized by our machines.
+
+The secular world may not have ears to hear about Christ, but it does have ears to hear about virtue. I think we can gain something here, and something worthwhile. I think many of us - myself included - have found conversion by a desire for virtue. Let it be so with our technology, too.

Archive/Blog Drafts/tinnitus.md

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+Earplugs are a really great invention.
+
+They're really not an option in modern industrial society. If you work in or around machines, you need to be wearing them. To not use earplugs will cause sensory damage.
+
+We call this damage tinnitus - a constant ringing in the ears.
+
+Normally I only put earplugs in if I'm working around something noisy - saws, grinders, mowers, and the like. But yesterday, I put in earplugs while just being in my house. It smacked me in the face again: a reality I don't want to be aware of.
+
+I have tinnitus.
+
+This isn't the first time I've realized this. Sometimes when I'm hiking the woods are quiet enough to make this apparent. Sometimes I step outside from the shop with my earplugs still on. I shouldn't be surprised with my decades of working around equipment. But man, it's just hitting me hard that I have this constant ring that I'm accustomed to. But the scary thing is to step back and remember that the material world is linked with the spiritual realm.
+
+_I have spiritual tinnitus._
+
+The problem with tinnitus is it makes it hard to hear. Things have to step above the baseline threshold. Have I onslaughted my soul with so much noise that hearing His voice in my life is more difficult now? That I am accustomed to - and create my own - spiritual noise?
+
+When things get noisy, I'm going to put in my earplugs. It's easy to hear noise and run from it; to change course. But what we need to do in the spiritual life is to continue onwards in courage. As St. Ignatius of Loyola says,
+
+"In time of desolation never make a change, but be firm and constant in the proposals and determination in which one was the day preceding such desolation."
+
+Earplugs make forging through easier, even though they force us to face our own tinnitus. Although this baseline hum we may have poisoned our souls with is irritating, to continue without earplugs will only make things worse. Cut the noise. Put on some site blockers. Switch to a flip-phone. There are many physical things we can do to make ourselves more attentive to the needs and yearnings of the soul rather than the distractions of the world around us.
+
+In times of noise, put in your earplugs.