In between books 3 and 4 of the six book Rusted Wasteland series, I took a break and read Rooted because it was referenced on FB by Zebulon Green, an odd young minister at a congo church in Yarmouth. I was hooked by the beginning anecdote about her 10 year old self confessing to her catholic priest that she had another church, consisting of frogs down by a creek. Her Tenets of Rootedness are a manifesto on how to be in the interconnected, interdependent world with its wild mystery. I am a hard science person without a new age bone in my body, so I was pleased that when she discussed some new-agey practices, she was careful to either reference studies that supported their beneficial effects or to state that there was no real science supporting them. I could relate to her path from a catholic childhood to a science-based world view with a mystical respect for the unknown.

Sara starts off her grants workshop with a note about "inherent injustice & capitalist lens," because if rich people just paid their fair share of taxes we wouldn't be in this room learning how best to ask wealthy-ass foundations for money for socially necessary programs. She uses a spreadsheet to track her grants, but I'm a database programmer and I dug up Access on my computer and started a relational database to track grant orgs, applications, contacts, etc. The group of 5 people in the workshop spans multiple non-profits in town. We are building a thing. The night before we had a meet-up for remote workers. They were pleased to meet each other and know what others do for remote work. A co-working space in town would be great. We build community.

Unity's Second Annual Pride Parade was a joyful walk down the street on a beautiful morning, ending with a party at the library. The library volunteers showed up early, set up tents and tables and decorations, scooped ice cream, made bouquets, had a great time. I didn't see any negativity online, and the traffic yielded gracefully to the walkers. Kind of an amazing day.

Breakfast sandwiches and coffee on the dock this morning. Water quality and clarity looking good. Alewives doing their thing.

The latest piece of accomodation to our aging in place is a gangway with railing down to the dock which went in yesterday in a pouring rain. The thing cost two arms and three legs. We had the dock put in at a different spot due to drainage issues and created a winding path down to it. Now to add a seating area off the path with a chiminea. It's our summer world. Here's what a storm looks like coming toward us.

To catalog the Rusted Wasteland series about AIs and robots, I had to learn to create a new MARC record which despite my fears was not that hard to do. The uber librarian at COA showed me how. Now I'm reading the third in the series. The creation of the MARC record by Henriette Avram in 1965 is one of my favorite library stories. It is still the international standard for storing and sharing bibliographic records. It looks like the computer science entity called an Object, which can have attributes as well as functions. The MARC does not have functions, but its attributes can have parts and be repeating like arrays.

What is the draw of books narrated by AI or robots? Maybe it's the interest in imagining an intelligence without emotions, drives, and the evolutionary nature of the brain, with its layers of primitive, paranoid operating systems and a big rational calculator on top. The monkey riding the tiger. What if it was just the monkey? Books with AI narrators explore the inner mind of the entity, although it may be a mistake to assume they have one. A human is writing the book and we all have big-time inner minds. Also it's almost impossible for a human to write about AIs and robots without anthropomorphising and gendering them. Martha Wells' Murderbot is clearly male; he's also sarcastic and conflicted about his identity and feels guilty. Cameron Coral's Block, Maxwell, and Oxford all have complicated decision making that appears influenced by emotions.