#john-mcphee — Public Fediverse posts

“Over a single weekend, entirely from scratch and heavily “#VibeCoded”, I created by some distance the best #WordProcessor I have ever used. I’ve named it #vibedit. I’m writing in it right now. If there is an actually #productive task for #GenerativeAI, it is as a creator of #bespoke #tools like this. …

… far from removing me from my #work, this #AI experience forced me to think carefully about how I work, and how to craft a fitting tool. I was also confronted as any #craftsperson should be by the minutiae of my #tools”

#WhiteCollar / #ZeroHourWork / #JohnMcPhee / #KEdit <https://archive.md/trxGO> / <https://ft.com/content/071b2770-5106-4530-a290-2a5eba06c8b2>

John McPhee’s Short Essay About A 1972 Rockefeller Civil Service Award Winner - Dr. Luna Leopold, The First Chief Hydrologist At The USGS
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https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/rockefeller-public-service-awards-washington-dc-19580430 <--JFK's 1958 speech at the Rockerfeller Civil Service Awards
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https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/lessons-learned-a-legend-luna-leopolds-view-river <-- shared details of Dr. Luna Leopold from the USGS
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https://fiddlrts.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-patch-by-john-mcphee.html <-- shared details of The Patch, by John McPhee
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https://eos.org/opinions/luna-b-leopold-geoscience-pioneer <--shared EOS retrospective of Dr Leopold
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I was reading - with a mug of tea - The Patch (link above) by John McPhee, a decades-old favourite author of mine - and came across this short essay amongst many fine others…
#spatial #datalover #measurements #metrics #hydrology #water #fedservice #fedscience #LunaLeopold #hydrologist #crossdiscipline #RockefellerCivilServiceAward #USGS #JohnMcPhee #writing #readingforpleasure #mission #opendata #mapping #waterresources #watersecurity #wateruse #watermanagement
@USGS

I have been digging out my old copies of John McPhee's #books, dipping in, remembering what it was like to be a new #geologist, and how it has carried across into #spatial #data, #geomorphology, #geomorphometry, #hydrology, #landcover, #engineeringgeology, #environmentalscience, #landuse, #massmovement and so much more......
This one paragraph reminded me so strongly of that time,, although I cannot of course write as eloquently:
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"I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes. Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. It was a fountain of metaphor—of isostatic adjustments and degraded channels, of angular unconformities and shifting divides, of rootless mountains and bitter lakes..."
#GIS #JohnMcPhee #science #scientificwriting #readingforpleasure #geology #water #landforms #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal

I’m a huge advice writing nerd.

#JohnMcPhee #writingAdvice

https://boffosocko.com/2024/01/15/55820869/

Chop wood, carry water

There is a well-known trumpet player named Rick Braun. Although a few years younger, he was born in the same city and went to the same high school as my dad. And if my memory serves, they were in high school at the same time and at least knew of each other. My dad played the trumpet in high school, even performing in a band. Many year ago, my dad saw Braun somewhere—a concert I think—and had a chance to speak with him. The story goes that my dad said something complimentary about Braun’s ability and talent. (Yes, this is all hearsay.) Braun’s reply? “What a lot of people mistake for talent is simply a lot of hard work.”

At Time in the nineteen-fifties, the entry-level job for writers was a column called Miscellany. Filled with one-sentence oddities culled from newspapers and the wire services, Miscellany ran down its third of a page like a ladder, each wee story with its own title—traditionally, and almost invariably, a pun. Writers did not long endure there, and were not meant to, but just after I showed up a hiring freeze shut the door behind me, and I wrote Miscellany for a year and a half. That came to roughly a thousand one-sentence stories, a thousand puns.

~ John McPhee from, Omission

slip:4unema1.

John McPhee is a stellar writer. He’s written a lot and, okay, sure, I get that. There are greatest-of-all-time musicians I’ve heard of who still do scales daily 30 years on. And McPhee wrote a thousand puns(!), a thousand titles, and a thousand one-sentence stories cut-down from larger stories. (And go read McPhee’s article right now, about omission.) And now here’s Braun’s comment. Frankly, I’ve heard this sentiment countless times in countless variations: The path to mastery? Chop wood, carry water.

The thing I’m not certain of though, from my dad’s story, is whether the takeaway for him was, “Oh cool, Braun’s just a regular guy who worked really hard!” or “Fudge, I shoulda’ stuck with the trumpet!”

ɕ

#7ForSunday #Apogee #BruceWConstantine #JohnMcPhee #Mastery #RickBraun

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”

~ John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Mt. Everest is 29,032 feet tall)

#JohnMcPhee #AnnalsOfTheFormerWorld #MtEverest #Limestone