Twenty-five years ago today, I married the most wonderful woman in the world. The best Mom, the best friend and companion, the best travelling partner, a secure, calm, commonsense counterweight to my craziness and insecurity. I thought I loved her as much as I could twenty-five years ago, but I was wrong. My love for her, my respect, appreciation, and admiration for her as a person and a professional, my […]
A vivid memory of an otherwise ordinary winter’s night in Burlington, Iowa when I was 16: It was early evening, completely dark. It was snowing but the wind was calm. Large heavy snowflakes were falling from a low sky. It was still and quiet; between the squeaking sound of each footstep in the fallen snow, I could almost hear the sound of the descending flakes landing. The streetlight was surrounded […]
The SSS Blog is moving to a new site, http://ssshupe.com. The advantages are more control (for me), no advertisements (for you), and my very own domain name. Readers shouldn’t notice any other big differences. The old site on WordPress.com will remain but won’t be updated regularly. I will probably play with the blog theme for awhile until I find one that suits me. Comments on what you like or dislike about […]
I turned sixty today. Not dealing with it particularly well, truth be told. I’m finally aware that my life is not just finite (something I knew intellectually but never felt inside), but extremely finite. All that time I had to do anything I wanted to do? Well, it’s mostly ticked away. There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to do, but never seemed to find the time to do, and that’s write. […]
A rhetorical question but, as you’ll see after a short techno-rant, one that opens a door into a basic truth about the world. For an older guy, I’m pretty tech savvy — early internet adopter (Usenet, anyone?), longtime Linux user (and reformed distro jumper), Python/machine learning dabbler. So the fact that the Windows operating system is still, after how many years now (well Windows 95 was a big thing, remember, […]
Less than four days from the election and the veil is already coming off. Repeal Obamacare? “President-elect Donald Trump is already signaling that he might backpedal on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” according to many sources, including the Washington Post. “Drain the Swamp” by eliminating the corrupt establishment from government? Nevermind. “President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition […]
Through the process of raising our boys, Suzie and I were introduced to the concept of “magical thinking,” a phenomenon common in adolescents. In that context, magical thinking is an unconscious belief that merely thinking that an positive outcome will occur is enough, by itself, to make it happen. Magical thinking allows adolescents to dream, to picture themselves as succeeding, without having to engage in any hard work to make success […]
I woke up at 4:15 this morning, panicked, out of a vivid, realistic dream. It took place at a lake that looked much like Donner Lake near Truckee, but with gentler slopes all around it, and with an enormous dam at the east end where the state park is. There were houses all up and down the hills around the lake, a small city really, four or five thousand people, […]
Election day 1980. I was in my second year of law school in Ithaca, New York, and invited about 15 of my fellow classmates/friends over to the attic apartment on College Avenue that I shared with my Sue and Sue to watch the election returns. As the evening went on and it became clearer and clearer that Ronald Reagan was going to become the next President, the sense of disbelief […]
I have a former colleague whose daughter is an outstanding soccer player on one of the best high school teams in the area. The paper today reported that her team had lost in the quarterfinals of the playoffs by a 1-0 score. That made me start thinking of how unfair it is that athletic contests have a binary outcome, and then thinking about how we overvalue the results of arbitrary […]