and a merry christmas to all

Just to wish you a merry christmas, happy new year, and/or what ever you celebrate this time of year. We have passed the solstice, the days are getting longer, spring will come, and life is good.

Several blogs have there best book of the year reviews out, but I will simply list the book that had the most impact on my life this year: Donald Robertson; The Pphilosophy of Cognitive - Behavorial Therapy.

During the reading of this book it became clear to me that all religion are just the sum of the past beliefs, and the sum of the decisions of those who are dead. The book does not suggest this, but it was during my reading of this that that obvious belief came to me. It points out so many historical sources of concepts; I had to look up a few of these in more detail. It clears away some more wrong beliefs. It became clear that all religions just fill up time with useless fiction. It is that displacement of time that has value to we humans who live in a time of excess, when all of our time is not used to obtain what we need for survival. Our mental time exceeds our physical time. Full stop. What? When we run out of physical energy, we still have mental energy left. Exhausted physically, but mentally aware, we need something to think about. Religion provides that, as does reality, or anything else. Religion took a run at teaching, but the subject matter is no longer of value as it has not been upgraded. Oh well, religions could be studied as historical myth systems. Anthropologist like studies in some cases.

Going forward from here, reality is all that matters.

After knowing what food one should eat, and what to avoid, and approximate quantities, the issues of doing that remain. And then there is all the other time that must be used. Retirement has freed up much time, as has letting go of the time sucking concepts of religion. Now that I understand what time sucks religions and religious thinking is. Now I have time, and little interests to fill that time. And limited physical ability, motivation, desire, energy, what ever is really short in the process of turning it into action or time filling pursuits that are driven. Action with no utility, beyond burning time, just does not cut it much.

The concept of time burning utility-less activity just does not appeal to me much. Understanding one more thing, say the evaluation of Eulers constant e, or wau, F, is just not moving me much. I spent much of my working life evaluating physical properties, some of which are system properties that change as a function of time, moisture content, stress history, structure development, chemical cementing, and all those weird and wonderful thing that happen in one off design and construction or geology formations. I have dealt with many theories that in reality are so wrong. Like pavement modulus, which is not a soils property but a system property. The equations need a constant pavement modulus, when in reality the value is space-time-rate dependent variable. In Engineering, everything needs to be reduced to simple usefulness, and simple enough that understanding all the inputs is not required.

We see "engineering design" utilizing programs that the designer does not understand how it works, but has nice input and output forms; some have crap models hiding inside, but nobody cares. It is quick and simple, and sort of works, except when it does not, and then much of the time it was close enough anyway. There was no longer any satisfaction in the engineering, it was just about making money. It is all done with, now, for me anyway. It is time to go forward into something new... or old.