Author: Hope Never Vanishes

  • our friend, our great gift, moves on…farewell to the Father of GIS

    our friend, our great gift, moves on…farewell to the Father of GIS

    With great sadness, we learned today that Dr. Roger Tomlinson, our dear friend and amazing mentor, has moved on.  Knowing Roger has been a treasure and a gift from the heavens and humanity.  Spending time with him was so inspiring.  Much will change, but much will continue to go on because of his help and influence to so many people across the world.

    Roger is known as the Father of GIS.  This may not mean much to those who do not know the power of the amazing technology that he envisioned and turned into reality.  His method of focus on business problems, and using GIS to solve these was true innovation – he is the best business analyst that we have ever met…  The IT people of today do not understand that the gap he will leave will be wide…

    I am very sad that I will not be able to give him his annual little elephant… I will add it to his collection, and for whoever inherits this, they will have elephants from around the world…

    Roger, we will always love you – you will live on in our hearts and minds forever…

  • dark matter…evolution…96% we just don’t know, and how that makes us anxious…

    dark matter…evolution…96% we just don’t know, and how that makes us anxious…

    so far, i think that the best way to handle the anxiety is to “let go of what you cannot control, and that which is on auto-pilot will take care of itself” (junk like breathing, your heart beating, your brain working, etc.)

    but it really is not always reassuring to watch it change and to watch the world and to think back and STOP… remember, it is not really valuable to do all that thinking…  Really?  well. it just happens.

    constantly, stuff flies into my face.  i saw this today  – read it for yourself (click to link)

    Ancient Plague’s DNA Revived From A 1,500-Year-Old Tooth… 

    and all of this “stuff” came from somewhere. right?  and i was reading an interview of Lee Randall in The Smithsonian Magazine

    and it really got me to thinking about how little we actually know, and how much we actually don’t know about our world, universe, cosmos – and then i thought of the perception of that it is so busy and so vast – and realizing that it is all the “input” that we get now, that we never got before a long time ago… in my grandmother’s day… gee, it was newspapers, and letters, and gossip – and then came television, “Huntley-Brinkley”… and Walter Cronkite…

    Is it any wonder that we get so revved up with so much stimulation by information coming at us?  no, not really.  our choice is to just “shut ‘er down, clancy” do a temporary shut-in when it gets to be too much…

    “for fast acting relief, try slowing down” – great quote from Lily Tomlin…

  • guess I am a texas girl, through and through…without the strange politics of today

    guess I am a texas girl, through and through…without the strange politics of today

    how many times can we see these gorgeous flowers and still feel in awe of the colors?  is there anywhere else that has this amazing variety within the borders of a state?  it triggers memories of the awe that my mother felt when she first witnessed the carpets of these gorgeous flowers when i was a third grader and we moved from the part of the state where these did not grow in profusion.  i had never seen the state flower until we moved south.

    i wish i could say that the texas politics of today did not bother me.  there have been way better times.  right now, the whole united states seems to be broken, taken over by extremism and disruption that makes progress stand still and go backwards.  what a shame.

    what i remember that was so amazing was space flight – astronauts – and men on the moon.  we had that amazing intelligence within our state and near to our area of it.  wow.  but it has ceased to be important to people who run our country who care more about containing women’s rights and putting energy into making sure that people can be legally armed, yet not do anything to improve the incidence of mental illness – it is incredible – the risks grow each day.

    if anyone thinks that a loaded weapon will do anything but facilitate sadness and tragedy, they are, as my dad used to say, “living in a dreamworld.”  it is a dangerous mindset.  a negative mindset.  it is the fight mentality that will only serve to destruct and make our world unlivable eventually.  wanna see the future?  go watch mad max.

    so, where did my bluebonnets go?  where are my red birds?  what happened to my clear air?

    why can’t we go outside anymore?

    why do we have to live in a guarded fortress?  self-fulfilling prophecy of the extreme patriots.  a helluva future vision, eh?  let’s hope not.

    fortress…

    hello history, is it now about time to begin a moderation phase?

    i miss edna.  she always was so calming and made so much sense.  she took the edge off…  bless her bones.  “who is edna?”, you might ask… she was a sage texas woman…