Home is Where Community Is

Thursday evening, I attended Sips with SCOTUS, an event sponsored by the ACLU of Utah, where four Supreme Court Cases are paired with four wines, and the legal staff shares the state and impact of the cases. The four areas that were discussed were presidential immunity, reproductive freedom, gerrymandering, and trans affirming healthcare.

Friday, I filled out my ballot and went shopping for the Jambalaya I made on Saturday. I had to make an extra trip to Sprout’s to get poblanos and a can of black-eyed peas. Why the recipe calls for a can, when dried black-eyed beans are easier to get is a mystery to me.

I also cleaned up some of the job descriptions for the Women’s State Legislative Council of Utah for the policy committee. I sent the updated descriptions to the last people responsible for those duties. One of the descriptions, the Nominating Committee, was needed by our meeting Wednesday.

Sunday was our turn to cook breakfast at the VOA Youth Center. Our typical menu option is a custom breakfast burrito on a flour tortilla or custom breakfast tacos on corn tortillas. I cracked 122 of the softest shelled eggs I have ever cracked, and am really concerned about how the hens must be treated. These eggs sometimes shatter in the egg carton and you have to break them on the inner side of a metal bowl very carefully so as not to make a mess. The shells are so soft that one tap is usually all it takes.

We ran out of scrambled eggs. At first, it didn’t seem like there were that many youth there, but there were, and they were hungry. As an extra treat, the Stonewall Dems made applesauce Bundt cake and spiced apple cider. I’m usually in charge of heating the tortillas over an electric griddle. I also donated another box of Danilynn’s clothes that were too large for me.

At church, our guest speaker was Sue Smith from Eckankar. She told us about the path of Ecks. Like Unitarian Universalists, they believe in the path of spiritual freedom. They respect all religions and beliefs. Founded in 1965 by Paul Twitchell, they believe that we are all souls trying to learn and embrace life. They believe in the constant need to be free.

Followers of the Path of Eck believe in an underlying fabric that keeps us together, growing in awareness of one another. They acknowledge that living life in this growing awareness requires risk. Like the Hindus, they believe in karma and reincarnation. They also believe in a love connection, and expanding our consciousness and abilities.

That afternoon, we had a record turnout at Queer Coffee! While six people may not seem like much, it is more people than we previously had. Most of those present vowed to come back every month and to bring a friend. Sometimes you just have to keep persistently meeting in deliberate community to foster the seeds of growth.

Sunday night, I and my kayak friends shared food and a movie at my place. One friend made split pea soup, I made a batch of Jambalaya, and another someone else brought drinks. Together, we selected and watched The Book of Silver, to which I, of course, ordered the book Dream a Little Dream, on which it is based, and added it to my list.

At the Women’s State Legislative Council meeting, we had speakers present on polling and the electoral college. Polling is very hard to get right, because it is very hard to avoid sampling error. Sometimes, when you think you’ve covered all the biases, an implicit bias actually has crept in, usually by the assumptions made about sampling. Access to and use of certain technologies, interest in participation in polling, potential to trust the polling the process, and lack of maliciousness are some the biases that are hard to get around. Quite often, they stem from other underlying biases in the sample set.

Dr Trevor Smith, Chief Research Officer of WPA Analytics, demonstrated how RealClearPolitics shows that the US Presidential races are statistically tied according to the latest polls, with Trump having a tiny advantage which is erased by adjusting for potential error. American historian Allan Lichtman, according to his Keys to the Whitehouse system, which was designed with Russian geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok, is predicting that Kamala Harris will win the election. Designed in 1981, this system has accurately predicted the outcome of every US presidential race since 1960. Ballots are already out, and regardless of prediction systems, it still comes down to voting.

Tara Rose, author of Why We Need the Electoral College, spoke about how the electoral college was not about slavery, but more about enshrining state power in the presidential election system. Each state sends a set of electors base on who won the popular vote in that state, and the electors actually cast the final votes to elect the president. In the event of a tie, the vote goes to congress to decide. The reality is that historical analysts who have looked into the states rights issue have determined it was actually based on a state’s right to continue to promulgate slavery. Rose is adamant that relying solely on the popular vote puts too much power in the hands of the president during reelection cycles.

Dr John Koza, Chair of National Popular Vote, talked about the state compact to make the electoral college vote more fair. While not in the constitution, most of the states have adopted a winner-takes-all system, in which whoever wins the popular vote in that state gets all the electoral votes for that state. The result is a disproportionate representation and ignorance of states that are not considered swing states. The messaging and proposed policies then come down to those which benefit those seven states in particular. The compact, which already has over a dozen signers, would redistribute delegates within a state to reflect the popular vote split within that state. The tabulation of the popular vote is still left to the states, the overall electoral college vote will line up more closely with the popular vote, candidates will spend more time in other states, and low population states will get a little more representation because of their sovereignty—though not as much. In the end, most votes cast will actually matter more and not be in horrible mismatch where some votes matter a lot more than others. This is the approach I prefer.

In The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers, the setting is equivalent to an interstellar truck stop. Individual members of several different species who are stuck there have to break down their personal and cultural barriers or risk being isolated and alone. Roveg invites Speaker over to share a meal, after carefully curating the samples to be not hazardous to her. Speaker appears a bit shy to be in such a more personal and intimate setting, which Roveg hadn’t anticipated at all. He invites her to eat with him in the projection room.

Captain Tem and Roveg also share a drink together, agreeing not to talk about what is bothering them. For Tem, it’s her shimmering, her sign that she is carrying a fertilizable egg, that she would prefer not to discuss. The last thing she wants to hear is congratulations.

Tupo winds up going into a coma trying to deliver cakes to Speaker. Unable to breathe the methane atmosphere, the team makes an emergency request for a doctor qualified to bring Tupo out of xyr coma. Because the doctor is an Exodan, Pei is curious which ship the doctor hails from. When Pei shares that her friend is from the Asteria, the doctor replies, ‘Our waterball team is better.’

I brought Docker Deep Dive, by Nigel Poulton, to the top of my reading stack in order to understand the Docker Engine for a project I am working on. Docker Engine is actually “jargon for the server-side components of Docker that run and manage containers.” ”The engine is designed to be “modular and built from many small specialized components.” In Docker Deep Dive, Poulton compares the Docker Engine to a car engine.

Docker runs containers, which are instances of images generated at run-time. These read-only shared images are sharable by multiple writable containers. Unlike Virtual Machines, containers are “designed to be stateless and ephemeral.”

Nigel Poulson also describes how to build Docker Swarms. He gives instructions on which network ports should be open, and the command used to initialize a swarm.

I finally got the container I was working on to install the python libraries that my client needs. Along the way, I learned a little more Docker, and I finished reading Docker Deep Dive. In More Stars the Grains of Sand, Al Forsyth posits the question about what is our most remarkable body part. It’s quite possibly our DNA. Every human body has so much DNA that if every strand were laid out end-to-end, it would be enough to stretch beyond Pluto. Extending end to end, it would reach the moon and back close to 1,500 times.

In Rocannon’s World, by Ursula K LeGuin, after being captured by rebels who attempted to burn him in a fireplace, ethnologist Rocannon breaks free, threatening his cruel captor with a stick that has become a convenient firebrand. ‘Out!’ he shouts, driving out the man who has been attempting to torch him alive. ‘‘You’re not master here. The lawless man is a slave, and the cruel man is a slave, and the stupid man is a slave. You are my slave, and I drive you like a beast.’ Exhausted, and with the help of Yahan, who was earlier dismissed and ran away himself, he is finally able to find a place to rest and sleep out of sight of anyone who may be searching for them.

Building community is not always easy, but it is part of what allows us to be better humans. We have to look beyond what makes us different, and learn to share with one another our meals, our stories, and the warmth of our homes. And we must not let those who promote inhospitality and divisiveness lead us. Truly, home is where community is, where we feel safe, warm, and valued.