Douglas Alpenstock

All the world is a book, waiting for a reader.

Any way that libraries can support this is a benefit to us all.

I am rarely seen at the local library, though I support if from afar; my small but select library is better.

But I firmly believe libraries matter: I recently had the opportunity to wander through the massive library stacks at my old university. Never did I feel more at home.

John Weiland wrote:I suppose there are days to be concerned about nasty SE and SW winds, but our worst right now are the NW ones Douglas A is sending down from the prairie provinces.  

Hijack alert:

FEEL MY DIVINE WRATH! MWAHAHA!

Well not really, we got whacked by those near-hurricane winds last weekend. Trees snapped off and half the neighbourhood lost power. Serious chainsaw festival. Weirdly, up on our steep hill, we didn't have any damage at all. I did make points with neighbours lending my little RV 2kW genny so their fridges and freezers wouldn't spoil.

/End of hijack

If I spend one single penny on a case, it's a hard case. Always.

Occasionally I get a soft case with an instrument. And I can pair it with a plastic shell hard case that has no lining. That works.

Sometimes I have bought old garbage guitars for the decent hard case they came with. Then I donate the junk guitar to people who are doing art projects or building funky birdhouses. My 2c.

Fresh air is good. Houses get stuffy and dusty in winter.

The air you're getting right now is probably as clean as it gets -- no dust or pollen or bugs, and possibly a few negative ions from the storm. All good stuff.

I don't air my house enough because I pay for my heat (natural gas) which ain't cheap. I tend to take *myself* out into the fresh air.

Tough call. I find that leaving the long sprouts intact actually slows down the plant -- it then has to decide what parts it should abandon. I snip them down to one or two "leafing out bits" (highly technical term) and make sure those are mostly buried. It seems to work out okay, though there may be better methods.

Cody Hahn wrote: To tell you the truth I struggle to ever stumble back upon some of the articles, tutorials, how-to sequences, etc that I once worked through just a decade or decade and a half ago. It just seemingly isn't there anymore (and some of it may literally not be on the regular internet any longer, if a server went down or websites expired, etc).  

Me too. I get this weird feeling that the amount of readily available knowledge online is actually decreasing.

Christopher Weeks wrote:What counts as knowledge?

Does it include all thoughts people have? If so, including people who are dead?

Phew, thorny question. But fair. If you don't ask the right question you don't get the right answer.

I rather like the definition of knowledge at oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com: "the information, understanding and skills that you gain through education or experience."

I like to think of knowledge as curated information and skills that expand and enhance understanding and inform useful or meaningful actions.

Knowledge has more "signal" than "noise." A snarky Reddit post that does not add value or advance human understanding qualifies as "noise" to me.

Raw data is not knowledge, but rather is raw material that can be converted into knowledge.

Dead people still speak wisdom and insight. The entirety of gutenberg.org surely has more signal than noise.

How's that?

For me, that's a seasonal choice.

In summer, my guitars are open to the house air, drinking in the humidity.

In winter, the air is dangerously dry for wooden instruments. Most are in cases with humidifiers.

Still, I keep one or two out so I can grab them for a quick strum. I've learned which ones are tougher than others and can take a bit more of the humidity swings without injury.

I figure it's about 2%. This is an astonishing number to me -- meaning knowledge available right now to any human with an internet connection.

Though my estimate was a complete shock to a young nephew who believed that ALL human knowledge was available on the Internet.

What's your estimate?