Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts

Monday, 7 March 2022

What I've Been Reading, January 2022

Links

Above the Fold

Miscellaneous

Coronavirus

The New Fascism, the Far-Right and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades (maybe just a few years) from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

  • What Is Fascism? An Excerpt From “Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It”, by Shane Burley, Truthout
    "There has to be a reliable base point when we are looking at something we think to be fascist, especially when it runs a certain level of subtlety that isn’t apparent on its own terms. I have defined fascism using two key primary points: inequality and essentialized identity.
    Inequality: The belief that human beings are not equal for immutable reasons, such as intelligence, capacity, spiritual caste, etc. This inequality is not just fact, but it is a sacrament, meaning that society should be constructed with cleanly defined hierarchies, which are natural, and that society would then be healthier when those hierarchies are made explicit and enforced. This also lends itself to the importance of elitism, that there must be an elite ruler caste, even though they usually reject the existing ruling class.
    Essential identity: Our identities are fixed and define us, they are not socially constructed or chosen. The most common of these is racial given white nationalism as the dominant form of Western fascism, but it could also include gender (male tribalism), specific ethnicities (inter-European nationalism), sexual orientation (extreme queer-phobia), or religion (Hindutva). And when I say essentializing identities I mean that it is not just an identity that is true (like being of African heritage), but that the identity defines you in some way as incidence.
    There are several points that I consider very important in the definition of fascism, but often put just secondary to the two critical points. This would include a mythology about its tribal group, the sanctity of violence, revolutionary strategy (in some degree), authoritarianism, populism, and the appropriation of the Left. While these almost always exist in relationship to fascism, they are not defining of fascism because they may exist outside of fascism. It is not uncommon to interact with revolutionary left movements that are authoritarian or fetishize violence, and while that may be abhorrent, it does not make them fascist. "
  • No, that’s not what fascism is, by Shane Burley, Gods & Radicals Press

Food

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely sustainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Is genetic engineering a doomed effort to reinvent nature’s wheel? by Nathanael Johnson, Grist
    "It’s not very exciting to say that each avenue of research project should be funded on its merits. It would be much more powerful if I could make the case that GE food can just never deliver as much public good as money spent elsewhere. But there’s just not good evidence for that the case.
    Indeed, it’s clear that genetic engineering can provide a huge monetary return on investment. The success of commercial biotech hints that the technology also could provide return on investment for the environment, and for humanity, if we pursued the right avenues. We don’t need GMOs to save the world. But they could probably help."

Practical Skills

American Politics

Linguistics

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Science Based Medicine

Gender and Sexuality

Artificial Intelligence

  • Why Tesla Cannot Solve Full Self-Driving, by Rebel Science, Medium
    "Deep Learning Is Hopelessly Flawed"
    "The brain can instantly perceive any pattern or object in sharp detail even if it has not seen anything like it before. A deep neural net would be blind to it."

Books

Fiction

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Wednesday, 21 October 2020

What I've Been Reading, September 2020

Links

Above the Fold

Miscellaneous

  • Neither nasty nor brutish, by Cathryn Townsend, Aeon
    "The Ik – among the poorest people on Earth – have been cast as exemplars of human selfishness. The truth is much more startling."
    This article makes some very good points about selflessness and generousity as basic human traits.
  • The self is not always selfish: Mary Midgley takes on Richard Dawkins, video interview with Mary Midgley on Aeon
    I don't agree with everything she says, but yes, selfishness is certainly not the central element of human fitness, just the opposite.

Coronavirus

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

Collapse

  • Here’s What The Real Future Probably Looks Like, by Jessica Wildfire, Medium
    "It’s not all starships and robots."
    The author is clearly not a kollapsnik, and is missing out on some of the basics, but even so she is catching on surprisingly well.

Responding to Collapse,

  • Mutual Aid, RBG, and Where We Go From Here, by Dawn Allen, Legal Reader
    "Our rights never should have rested in RBG’s hands alone. The recent surge of mutual aid groups may help prevent that situation in the future."

Resource Depletion, formerly (and still including) Peak Oil

The change in title stems from the fact that it's not just oil that is peaking.

Climate Change

Economic Contraction and Growing Inequality

  • Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy, by James Surowiecki, Medium—Marker
    "Gyms, restaurants, and movie theaters are all reeling for the very same reason"
    Evidently, declining surplus energy is not the only thing that can cause economic contraction. The current pandemic is quite effective, and "opening things up" doesn't help much when people are still concerned about exposing themselves to a very real risk.

Energy

Agriculture

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Elephant in the room: Why getting the GMO story straight is so hard, by Nathanael Johnson, Grist

American Politics

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Pseudoscience, Quacks and Charlatans

Gender and Sexuality

There is No God, and Thou Shall Have No Other Gods

I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I am an atheist, but I may not have made it clear that I think any sort of worship is a bad thing and that believing in things is to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, I do not believe in belief itself. That's what the "Thou shall have no other gods" is about—it's not enough to quit believing in whatever God or Gods you were raised to believe in, but also we must avoid other gods, including material wealth, power and fame.

Further, many people today (including most atheists) follow the religion of "progress", which is based on the belief that mankind is destined to follow a road that leads from the caves ever upward to the stars, and that however bad things seem today, they are bound to be better tomorrow due to technological advancement and economic growth. This is very convenient for those who benefit most from economic growth, but it is hardly based on any sort of science and leads to a great deal of confused thinking.

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

Humour

Books

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Didn't finish any non-fiction books this month, but I'm working my way through a couple of good ones and hope to finish one or maybe both by the end of October.

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Thursday, 20 August 2020

What I've Been Reading, July 2020

Links

Above the Fold

Miscellaneous

At the Doomstead Diner

Over the last while I've gotten together on Skype with RE at the Doomstead Diner and made a few videos. Here are links to what we've done so far. There is more to come.

Defund the Police

Coronavirus

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

The New Fascism, and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

Economic Contraction and Growing Inequality

  • The Ides of Autumn--Seeds, Stagflation and Crash Risk , by Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics
    "For anyone involved in economic interpretation, these are hectic times. They’re frustrating times, too, for those of us who understand that the economy is an energy system, but have to watch from the sidelines as huge mistakes are made on the false premise that economics is ‘the study of money’, and that energy is ‘just another input’."

Recipes and Cooking

  • Bouillon Brodo Caldo Dashi, Medium-Anthology of Cooking
    "The broths of several cultures, their preparation and use"
    I find broths freeze quite well. I also tend to cook them quite a bit longer than this piece suggests, like overnight. Very few tings benefit by being turned in a race.

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Genetically modified literature (in which I read books so you don’t have to), by Nathanael Johnson, Grist

Practical Skills

American Politics

  • What Could Happen If Donald Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat?, by Jabin Botsford, The New Yorker
    "A new book conjures three scenarios in which President Trump could lose the election but not step down."
  • Are you a conservative? It’s a trick question., by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
    This article makes some good points, but I'd say that conservatism is a force for evil, and still a powerful one.
  • Biden’s Big-Tent Strategy Seems to Be Working, by John Cassidy, The New Yorker
    "None of this means that Biden is a lock for the Oval Office. Between now and November 3rd, something could conceivably shift the momentum against him, such as a Vice-Presidential pick that backfires, a major slipup in the debates, or a surprising economic upturn. Right now, though, the challenger’s strategy of keeping the focus on the incumbent and pitching a broad tent that accommodates anyone who wants to see the back of Trump is working well."

Canadian Politics

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Science Based Medicine

"Science is properly reductionist for a reason. In order to understand the world, and to have reliable empirical knowledge, you have to build your theories from the bottom up, but also confirm them from the top down. This means that we correlate ultimate effects with basic knowledge about mechanisms. Scientific knowledge does not have to flow in any particular direction. At times we discover something fundamental about the world, and then look for implications and applications. At other times we observe effects in the world, and then reverse engineer their cause. In either case real scientific phenomena become increasingly embedded in this network of knowledge. When a claim remains persistently isolated at one level, and neither leads to further applications or to more basic discoveries about the nature of reality, that is suspect." Steven Novella

There is No God, and Thou Shall Have No Other Gods

I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I am an atheist, but I may not have made it clear that I think any sort of worship is a bad thing and that believing in things is to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, I do not believe in belief itself. That's what the "Thou shall have no other gods" is about—it's not enough to quit believing in whatever God or Gods you were raised to believe in, but also we must avoid other gods, including material wealth, power and fame.

Further, many people today (including most atheists) follow the religion of "progress", which is based on the belief that mankind is destined to follow a road that leads from the caves ever upward to the stars, and that however bad things seem today, they are bound to be better tomorrow due to technological advancement and economic growth. This is very convenient for those who benefit most from economic growth, but it is hardly based on any sort of science and leads to a great many confused and incorrect ideas.

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

Artificial Intelligence

  • If You Think GPT-3 Makes Coders Obsolete, You Probably Do Not Write Code, by Chris I., Medium--Data Science
    "In rebuttal of data scientists and developers going obsolete"

    • Books

    Fiction

    Non-Fiction

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    Wednesday, 28 March 2018

    Autobiographical Notes, Part 1: Childhood and Education

    Dad and me, June 1958

    I've been writing this blog for the last six years and for most of that time there has been nothing here about me other than my name and a photo. A couple of years ago I added an ”About Me" section that was only a few paragraphs long, and didn't go into much detail. I've long held that nurture is at least as important as nature, if not more so. I guess it stands to reason that a little more about my history might be interesting to those who may be wondering how I came to think the way I do.

    So, what follows is a more complete autobiography.

    My name is Irv Mills and I live in Kincardine, a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada.

    My parents got married late in their lives. That was in 1951 and by the time I was born in 1954, Mom was 35 and Dad was 44. I've noticed changes in my outlook as I've aged over the years since my children were born and I suspect that my folks we probably not a typical young couple when they had me, and five years later, my sister.

    The story goes that they were standing together outside the nursery in the hospital, looking through the glass at me, and Dad asked, "Do you think we can raise him?" I don't recall what Mom was supposed to have said, but having been in Dad's position myself, I can certainly sympathize with him.

    I was born in the hospital in Shelburne, Ontario and grew up on a farm about 15 miles north of there, half a mile south of the little hamlet of Honeywood. This is only about 70 miles north of Toronto, which is certainly a cosmopolitan city, but Honeywood was, and still is, a long way out in the boonies.

    Rural electrification, which the company I used to work for (Ontario Hydro) was justifiably proud of, didn't happen on the township road where I grew up until the mid 1940s, only about 10 years before I was born. Dad had always farmed with horses, one of his great loves. After they were married Mom insisted (to hear her tell it, anyway) that he get a tractor. But don't be mistaken, Dad was all for progress and made it clear to me that the "good old days" were anything but. Powered machinery and electricity made farming not just easier, but safer in many ways.

    One of the benefits of growing up on the farm was that I got to go to work with my Dad quite often, especially before I started school. Part of that was to give Mom a break and let her get something done other than taking care of me.

    I suspect I was about 15 months old when she asked Dad to take me with him one day. He was in the middle of the spring planting, driving our seed drill up and down a field planting grain. This machine was still horse drawn and it took three horses, our two and one borrowed from one of my uncles. There was a board along the back of the seed drill, a few inches above ground level that you stood on with the lines from the team of horses in your hands to steer them. I was too small to stand beside him on the board, so Dad set me on top of the machine, on the lid of one of the bins full of seed grain and steadied me with one hand while driving the horses with the other.

    For some reason this became a ritual that I took part in every spring-- even when I was a teenager and we weren't getting along too well. After I finished school and left home to go to work, if Dad was planting and I was home, I'd go for a ride with him. I have a memory (probably from when I was a year or two older than 15 months) of sitting on the seed drill worrying about what would happen if I fell forward under the machine. But I didn't, and soon I was old enough to stand beside Dad, which was safer and more fun. There are people these days who would like to stop kids from working with their parents on farms, but I don't agree. I'd say this is a privilege that farm kids enjoy and city kids miss out on. When my own children came along, I let them ride on their grandfather's knee on the tractor and in front of him on the back of a horse.

    The old farm house wasn't in the best of shape and while it did have electricity, it didn't have indoor plumbing. So in the summer of 1956 we built a new house, and the following year Dad and his brothers tore down the old farm house which had been there since sometime in the latter half of the 1800s. I was there "helping" them and learned some new and very expressive words of which Mom did not approve. The lumber from the old house was stored away in a vacant building that Dad called the "sheep pen". Over the next thirty years this was used for various projects around the farm, and was available when I needed wood for whatever I was working on as well.

    Possibly from watching all this activity with people using tools, I developed a love of tools very early in my life and by the time I was eight had a hammer, hand saw, axe, shovel and wheelbarrow of my own. Later I got an electric drill, a soldering gun, a multimeter and an assortment of pliers and screw drivers.

    We were not rich by any means--barely middle class, I would say--but there was always food on the table, and I had enough clothes to wear. And there were always presents for my birthday and Christmas. In addition to tools, I liked sets of building blocks and science related stuff. When I was somewhat older I was given a chemistry set, a microscope and an electric motor kit.

    Mom's mom lived with us when she wasn't staying with Mom's older brother in Alberta, and full time from the early 1960s on. When I was about 5 years old, she bought us a TV so that she could watch hockey on Saturday nights. We had a 50 foot antenna tower and, at the start, got just one channel, the CBC station in Barrie, about 35 miles to the east of us. I remember watching the Walt Disney show every Sunday night and being especially impressed with Davey Crockett.

    There was also a science show on CBC called "The Nature of Things". According to Wikipedia, the first host was Donald Ivey, with Patterson Hume co-hosting many episodes. All I can remember is there were two guys talking about science, which I found extremely interesting. And they explained it well enough that it was not hard to follow.

    Although she was 75 years old in 1960, Grandma took charge of our half acre garden. She also looked after me so Mom could help Dad with the farm work, and told me about her life and how things were done in the old days. But, like Dad, she never called them the good old days.

    Mom read to me at bedtime when I was little, until I started reading to myself. One time she went on a bus trip with the local Women's Institute and came back with a copy of "Swiss Family Robinson", which she read to me. This book was full of people making things for themselves and very much caught my imagination.

    Living where we did, there weren't a lot of other kids around to play with. The nearest, my friend Brian Baker, lived about three quarters of a mile down the road from us. We got together for play dates occassionally before starting school and were friends until he dropped out of school and went to work after grade 11. I have always pretty good at amusing myself and prefer having a few close friends to having a larger circle of more casual acquaintances.

    Where I grew up little kids wandered around on their own whenever we felt like it and weren't seen as being in any sort of danger. Mom would send me outside and say down come back until suppertime. I had the whole farm to play in and sometimes went farther afield.

    I started elementary school in the fall of 1960, at the school in Honeywood, a half mile walk from home (and not uphill in both directions). That was Grade One--there was no kindergarten. Most schools in the area were still of the one room type, but ours had a total of 4 rooms and included both elementary and high school. By the time I was in grade 4, the high school part was shut down and the older kids bussed to the high school in Shelburne.

    When I was in Grade One I was in a room with Grades One to Four, and a total of 13 children. I always found these multi-grade rooms good, as you could listen when the teacher was instructing the older grades rather than being bored with whatever your where supposed to be doing at your own grade level.

    At some point during my first week or two of school I was given a sheet of colouring to do. Now I had never had a colouring book before and staying inside the lines was a new concept for me. The teacher was less than impressed. I had encounter a blank sheet of paper before, though, and when given one I was able to draw quite well. I eventually got better at colouring, but throughout my life I've done better when winging it than when required to stay inside the lines--just no respect at all for arbitrary rules.

    There was an arena with a skating rink in Honeywood, and every Friday afternoon we walked there from the school and had an hour or so of skating. I enjoyed skating, though I had, very little interest in hockey.

    When the high school moved out of the school in Honeywood, the room I'd been in during the first three grades was converted into a library. There was even one or two science fiction books in it. I remember reading Les del Rey's Step to the Stars, about the building of the first space station, by lantern light during the big blackout in 1965.

    Once a month, a trunk full of books would arrive at the school and I remember finding more science fiction in it on a couple of occasions, such as Del Rey's Outpost of Jupiter and Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky.

    In Grade 2 we actually had science as a subject, with a science textbook that made a big impression on me.

    During my first few years in school, the space race was heating up, culminating with the first moon landing the summer of 1969, when I was between grades 9 and 10. This made the science fiction I was reading seem pretty plausible and further stoked my interest in science and technology.

    For the first few grades my teacher was dear old Mrs. MacLean who was very nice and especially good with the younger children. But then we switched over to Mrs. Rutledge who was anything but nice. I have since realized, though, that it was under her ungentle tutelage that I was forced to master spelling and arithmetic, skills that have surely come in handy since then.

    Mom's brother was in the Signals Corps during WW II and Mom had help him study electricity and electronics. She got me interested in those subjects, which involved much experimentation and lots of blown fuses. To reduce the amount of smoke Mom got me subscriptions to Elementary Electronics and Popular Electronics.

    Mom was also interested in history and geography and I picked up on that. She had a globe and one Christmas when I was pretty young I asked for and received an atlas. I still love maps and when I was in high school I did pretty well at orienteering even though I wasn't a great runner--just really good at finding my way around.

    There were a number of historical fiction books in the public school library written to appeal to boys, usually involving some young fellow caught up in famous historical events. There were also some non-fiction book that I really enjoyed. I brought Thor Heyerdahl's Kontiki Expedition home when I was in grade 5 or 6, and stayed up half the night reading it.

    Politics was a popular topic of discussion in my family and we were a fairly left wing bunch. Mom had grown up in a coal mining town in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta and her father had been a miner. Both she and her mother were very much in favour of unions and not frightened by the ideas of communism. She had a couple of books which she read to me: Peoples of the USSR, a kind of propaganda-ish look at the native peoples of each of the Soviet Republics, and "Behind the Urals", a story about a welder from the USA who went to Russia in the 1930s and worked in Magnitigorsk, where Russia was struggling to set up its iron and steel industry.

    Many farmers in Ontario are quite conservative and support the Conservative party, but not Dad. His political opinions fit in pretty well with Mom's.

    My Dad's family were Anglicans. Mom had gone to the United Church of Canada before moving to Ontario but switched to the Anglican Church after getting married. Grandma's Dad had been a Mormon and that had somewhat turned her away from religion. But none of us were seriously religious and we rarely went to church. I was sent to Sunday school but by the time I was 9 declared myself officially an atheist.

    I think it was in 1965 (Grade 6) that several of the one room schools in our township where closed and their students started to be bused to our school in Honeywood. That was when I met my friend Johnny Power.

    I started high school in the fall of 1968, at Center Dufferin District High School in Shelburne. This gave me access to a larger library, more advanced science classes and shop class. Skills I picked up in shop class made a big difference when I later became an apprentice electrician.

    For the first couple of years that I was in high school, a semi-trailer full of books for sale would show up every so often. I remember picking up books like Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Frank Herbert's Dune and Samuel R. Delany's Nova. There was some science fiction in the high school library as well. I particularly remembers Asimov's Foundation series and I, Robot, Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, and John Wyndham's Day of the Triffyds.

    I had subscriptions to several science fiction magazines, including Fantastic Stories and Amazing Stories, which later change its name to Analog Scienice Ficiton/Science Fact.

    I also read quite a few science books including, Asimov's New Intelligent Man's Guide to Science and Arthur Clarke's Promise of Space. I developed a real love for reading about science, the kind of stuff that I imagine many people find pretty dry.

    This was long before the internet or even personal computers, and the only way to study up on a subject was books and magazines. Living where I did, a chance to go to a book store or a news stand was a rare treat. Being interested in the latest technological developments could be quite frustrating because it was so hard to find up to date reading material.

    Part way through high school I became friends with Owen Atkinson, who lived on a farm just a few miles west of Honeywood. In the spring of 1972 he introduced me to the Baha'i Faith and I shortly became a member of that religion.

    In the summer of 1972, my friend Johnnie Power was killed in a car accident. An event that left a lasting mark on me.

    In Ontario at that time high school went all the way up to Grade 13 instead of just Grade 12 which is common most everywhere else. That extra year was necessary if you planned to go to university, which I did. I graduated from Grade 13 in 1973 and was accepted into the Engineering Science program at the University of Toronto. I had done very well in our small high school, but after 2 weeks I dropped out of university and came home. I could say it was the culture shock of moving from the farm to downtown Toronto. But it would be closer to the truth to say that the first year programs at U of T were intended to weed out the weaker students, and that worked quite effectively on me.

    Well, this seems like a good point to stop for now. Next time, I'll cover another chunk of my life.


    Links to the rest of this series of posts:

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