Filmmaker David Lynch has a YouTube series where he recently discussed making his own iPhone holder.  The purpose seems to be to use the iPhone as a camera and attach it to a tripod.  He admits at the end that you can buy similar devices and that they are probably “better” than the one he is making.  Yet he is persisting with making his own clunkey, wooden iPhone holder.

Of course David Lynch is an artist and can do whatever he wants with little of the sort of scrutiny the rest of us would receive.  I’m sure if I were making something like this and showed it to people they would politely mention that you can buy such things, and buy them cheaply.  But this is where it hits closer to home: I often buy and repair things in ways that might not appear to make sense.

First we need to ask what is “sensible”. Sometimes I do things for the experience.  I was going to use the word “joy”, but much of the time it isn’t joyful.  Sometimes you can save some money. I recently fixed a broken sprinkler pipe.  Had never done it before and it may have saved me $100, maybe more. On the balance my time and effort, depending on how you count it, was worth much more than what it would have cost to pay someone else to fix it.

So why do such things? I would say for reasons Mr Lynch omits, perhaps not accidentally.  Once you have built a thing you “own” it.  You understand exactly how it works.  You can make another one, or make a better one.  You can start to understand the pieces that attach to the thing, in this case the iPhone on one end and the tripod on the other.  Lastly, you can get exactly what you want.  I am dabbling with a home lawn sprinkler controller.  There are several available, but none that I really like.  I can build what I want to work exactly the way I want.  Even better, as my needs or wishes change, I can change my design, fix it up without having to trash the old product then replace it with the shiny new one., that might still not be exactly what I want. 

An interesting announcement from Nvidia.  Not long ago I was building such GPU clusters for the financial services industry.  Nvidia seems to be moving up the food chain from a graphics coprocessor developer to a full systems house.  Their rumored interest in ARM could make them a new version of the fully integrated systems houses of yore, like IBM and Sun.

AI of the Storm: How We Built the Most Powerful Industrial Computer in the U.S. in Three Weeks During a Pandemic

The making of Selene is a tale of systems expertise that’s bringing high performance computing to the data center.

In case you weren’t paying attention, while the Congress argues over funding for the unemployed in this pandemic, the Federal Reserve has bought $7 Trillion (yes, trillion) in corporate debt in open market actions.  This may not even be legal.  What it does is prop up stock markets, sending vast sums to the already wealthy.  From Marketwatch.

Fed slows corporate debt purchases to trickle

Fed’s overall balance sheet at $6.9 trillion

I have estimated that the death count from COVID-19 is about 50% too low.  This is from looking at numbers early in the pandemic.  Thing is, overall death counts are hard to hide. And since the death rate is fairly predictable you can look at the “excess deaths” in 2020 and get the true COVID-19 death count.  Note that this also has the effect of removing the count of very sick people who would have died from something else had COVID-19 not taken them.  From the New York Times.

Taking a break from golf and Twitter to make America great again.  From the BBC.

US calls for shower rules to be eased after Trump hair complaints

The Supreme Court’s enigmatic “shadow docket,” explained

How the Supreme Court hides major conservative victories in plain sight.

From the Vox article:

According to a November 2019 paper by University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight such applications — averaging one every other Term.”

By contrast, “in less than three years, [Trump’s] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone).”

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has rewarded the Trump Justice Department’s behavior. Vladeck finds that the Trump administration achieved a full or partial victory in about two-thirds of cases where it seeks to temporarily block a lower court opinion. What was once extraordinary is now quite ordinary.

I know Wade Davis mostly from his book The Serpent and the Rainbow.  This article is a  good read but I have to add that the plague in the middle ages did not mean the end for Europe.  I am skeptical of a Chinese Century and think America may get a second shot, if only by default.  But hey, that first shot was by default, too.  From Rolling Stone

The Unraveling of America

Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era

I grew up in Louisiana and politics there still exists in the shadow of Huey Long.  Other varieties of populism have also sprouted there, including David Duke who was the prototype for Trump, if not the entire modern Republican Party.  From Current Affairs.

Huey Long and the Power of Populism

What we can learn from the successes and failures of “the Kingfish.”