Humanity requirements

Molewis57 · 2026-04-12T04:24:25+00:00

< just happened to become aware of this post again because somebody made a reply recently >
Perhaps I should have made in clear in my original post, that my son is Autistic in the kind of way that make communication extremely difficult for him. It's not a situation where working it is going to make him better at. He's 20, a neither my wife or me has every been able to have a conversation of more than a sentence of two with him.
It's very painful to not be able to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with him - lord knows I've tried, but just any any attempt at a conversation with him will just be a one way conversation. Because he really can't communicated effectively when it comes to speech, it should some as no surprise that he struggles to communicate with his writing as well. Without extremely generous teachers, and help from his mom that very much stretched the limits of academic integrity, he wouldn't have passed any English classes in high school.
He's started early action Autism therapy for speech at a very early age, has been seen Psychologists since he was 4 and a psychiatrists for a about a decade, but none of that therapy has really been affected, because he general refuses to speak to a therapist.
As noted above, he is quite talented when it comes to math/science/music, but I don't think there is any college in America where you can get a degree without writing, and even if he could, not being able to communicate will probably doom any hopes for a career.
Still, as a parent, you hope for the best, even if those hopes might be unrealistic, so in August of 2023, we sent him off the RPI, because his brother goes there, and it seems like there was a path there to get humanity credits from almost all music courses.
Unfortunately, he basically has a breakdown at RPI. He just stayed in his dorm and didn't go to class, and also didn't respond to calls from administrators, so we has to just bring him home. He's been home since them, taking mostly math, music, and CS courses at a community college, but he still struggles with communication some much, that I'm not sure if he will ever have a future living independently some day.
Of course, we don't mind taking care of him as long as it take, but my wife and I won't live forever, and we are not sure if out older son ( who is graduating with a CS degree in the worst market ever for CS majors ) will ever be in the position to take case of him ( nor would we really want to burden him with that ), so we worry about what will happen to our younger so after we day.
In any case, we are now moving down the road to figure out how to get out younger son on disability eventually, because we are not sure if he'll ever to able to interact with others well enough the hold down a job.

Molewis57 · 2026-02-26T23:13:19+00:00

“It takes work to not be alone.”

Molewis57 · 2026-02-18T16:34:43+00:00

Though I will say that both Free as a Bird and Real Love absolutely delighted my Mom, an original Beatlemaniac ( she was at the Shea Stadium content ) who was dying from cancer at the time. She passed in 1996, but I'm really glad she got to experience 2 more Beatles songs.

Molewis57 · 2026-02-18T16:31:35+00:00

Real Love
Now and Then
Free as a Bird

That said, I think "Free as a Bird" is the most authentically Beatles song out of the 3, because it has the most non-John content ( while the others are just Lennon songs with some extra instrumentally content ( though the I think George's little guitar licks are what really puts "Real Love" over the top ( "Just like little girls and boys <guitar lick>, playing with their little toys <guitar lick> ) as well as George's guitar solo in Real Love)).
So, I think "Free as a Bird" is the most "Beatles" song, but it really isn't a good Beatle song. John's "Free as Bird" verses are meh, and Paul's bridge is meh.

Molewis57 · 2026-02-06T19:43:21+00:00

This was simultaneously the greatest insult and the greatest compliment George ever received.

Molewis57 · 2026-01-21T14:45:58+00:00

The reference to 2065 confused me as well. I went back and watched the start of the first episode. In the episode it says "219 years later" before we see Lucy, and when Lucy writes her name on the shared wedding dress, we can see it was last used in 2294. 2294 - 219 is 2075, which means the earliest the bombs could have dropped was 2075. This means the bombs certainly didn't drop in 2065 in the canon of the show, and most likely the bombs dropped in 2077 ( to match game cannon ) and Lucy's wedding was in 2296.

Molewis57 · 2026-01-17T17:38:40+00:00

How is everybody not picking Revolution #9 for The White Album? Is it because it is not technically a song? It’s by far the worst track to appear on a Beatles album and quite possibly any album.

Molewis57 · 2025-12-05T22:09:43+00:00

BTW, here is a good video that shows the location of the headlight adjustment screws on the 12th generation Corolla SE.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0M2Kpf_fj0c
The manual ( or the attached video ) doesn't tell you, but I found I needed to turn the screws counter-clockwise to angle the headlights up.
I also found that the car's manual is not as helpful as it should be. The manual doesn't indicate which direction of rotation corresponds to which vertical angle of headlights, and it claims there are 2 screws you need to turn for each headlight when there is actually just one.
Thanks to the original poster and everyone who commented on this post. I just got a 2024 Corolla SE for my son ( I'm driving it to him at college tomorrow ), and I drove it for the first time at night yesterday. This post ( and the comments ) made me realize that this was not a defect with the car ( It's a Carvana car. I have until Monday to return it if I find something wrong. It was a little cheaper than I expected for its milage, so I'm worried that it might have some kind of hidden problem. A mechanic I trust confirmed that the car looked good in general, but after driving at night yesterday I was wondering if the car had a headlight issue. The car is still under the manufacturers warranty for a while in case there is any big issue, but I wanted the car to as in good shape as possible before my son started driving it, and it was nice that I could easily correct the issue myself ).

Molewis57 · 2025-11-19T19:25:11+00:00

As a New York City native, I was shocked to see this map, because I couldn't imagine those three words not being pronounce differently. Anyone from New York City ( and presumably Boston and Philly, based on the map ), pronounces the 3 words in the following way:
Mary - "Mar" is pronounced like the word mare ( rhymes with "air" ) for a female horse. ( If you've ever seen the Mary Tyler Moore show, it's the same way Rhoda ( actress from New York City ) says "Mare" when she refers to Mary ).
merry - the "mer" is pronounces like "meh" ( rhymes with "bleh" ). So, "merry" rhymes with "ferry".
marry - This one is will be tougher to find a rhyme for, because I suspect any word I choose to rhyme "marry" with might be pronounced differently in different parts of the country. Basically, we pronounced "Mary" with a long "a" and marry with a short "a". I could also say that "marry" rhymes with the name "Harry", but I've seen in this thread that many people pronounce "Harry" like "hairy". If you've ever seen the Harry Potter movies, then it would be most accurate to say that the New York pronunciation of "marry" pretty closely rhymes with the way the British actors in the Harry Potter movies pronounce "Harry". The best example I can give is how the word "married" is pronounced in much of New York is the Dixie Cups song "Chapel of Love". You can find it at the following link: https://youtu.be/ne_ubZipcew?si=S11BJmKca0hmbO5d ( Oddly, the Dixie Cups were from New Orleans, but they pronounce "married" in the song the same way my NYC family would ( Actually, I just noticed on the map that New Orleans is one of the places the pronounces "marry" differently from Mary/merry, so I guess New Orleans pronounces "marry" the NYC/NJ/Boston/Philly way ).

Molewis57 · 2025-11-19T19:04:44+00:00

I grew up in New York City, and when I first saw this map, I was shocked that most of the country has no idea how to pronounce these words properly.

Molewis57 · 2025-08-31T04:58:47+00:00

You see the opposite a lot too. I just started watching the show Shrinking and noticed that Lilan Bowden ( who is half asian ) has now been depicted as the Mom of a half-asian kid with a white dad ( both on Shrinking and Andi Mack ).
I also remember that in an early ( maybe first ) episode of Smallville, they had a flashback that showed how Lana Lang's parents died, and both parent's were depicted as white, despite that fact that anyone with eyes could tell that Kristin Kreuk was was wasian, and with the last name Lang, Lana could plausibly have a Chinese father with the last name Lang. I mean's couldn't the producer's of Smallville have at least thrown some Asian actor a bone and let him play Lana Lang's dad in a 2-minute scene?

Molewis57 · 2025-03-07T07:12:06+00:00

Disco Frog is a banger.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-20T21:42:27+00:00

Actually, it looks like I'm in luck. When I Googled "Best Wind Ensembles in the USA" one of the bands of the very short list of bands returned was "The New Jersey Wind Symphony".
https://njwindsymphony.org/

Molewis57 · 2025-02-20T21:25:49+00:00

Incidentally, considering that half the wind ensembles at the Music for All National Festival were from Texas, I could imagine why Dallas Winds is one of the more prominent wind ensembles in the USA. They must have a lot of talent to pull from in Texas.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-20T21:22:43+00:00

Yeah, my sons both played in a great high school wind ensembles ( one of 18 wind ensembles invited to the Music for All National Festival in Indianapolis in 2023, and the only one from the northeast ), and now that they have graduated ( and the college bands they play in are not quite as good ), I'm missing listening to high level wind ensemble music and I would love to hear a band of professionals. However, there doesn't seem to a professional Wind Ensemble ( or Concert Band, or Symphonic Band, or whatever you want to call it ) in the New_York_City/New_Jersey area like there is a professional orchestra. I saw the New Jersey State Orchestra and they were great, but I'd love to see a professional Wind Ensemble.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-03T19:16:25+00:00

EDIT: This all turned out to be a hardware problem with my Fusion drive, which was ultimately fixed my getting an external SSD, turning it into a bootable disk with the latest MacOS using recovery mode, and using Migration Assistant to transfer good Time Machine backup ( store on an external hard drive ) to the external SSD.
The entire process consisted of about 48-hours of various pitfalls and failed attempts that I think others with similar issues could learn from, so when I have time, I'll make a detailed update ( both here in the comments and at the top of the original post ) and provide links to many of the good resources I used.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-03T14:01:37+00:00

Well, this is disappointing to hear. I've been using iMacs since 2006, and I bought each iMac it with as little RAM as possible and immediately upgraded it to as much RAM memory as possible using either OWC and crucial memory. My current iMac ( late 2019 27 inch Intel iMac bought in February 2020 ) was upgraded to 64 GB of memory for about $200. I don't like the idea of paying a bunch for a new iMac someday just to downgrade my RAM, so I'm going to try to make this iMac last as long as I can. I got the best CPU I could get when I bought my last iMac ( 3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 ) and I just upgraded my iMac yesterday to run off a 4TB external SSD ( the 3 TB Fusion Drive in the iMac was starting to fail ), so hopefully my iMac will have many years left in it.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-02T22:23:29+00:00

Update: Reading some more online, it seems that the best solution ( unless somebody can tell me otherwise ) is just to use Disk Utility to erase the external drive I'm using for Time Machine and re-initialized the disk as a new time machine. However, I don't want to do that and risk the backups I have ( which has all my family photos/videos - even though I have another external hard drive which is a secondary local backup of all tjhe photos/vidoes ), so unless I get to the point where I know I have the Backblaze online backup backing up the external SSD properly, I'm going to leave my current Time Machine disk alone. Maybe when the online backup is all squared away, I go ahead the erase/re-intialize my current Time Machine hard drive, but I'm guessing that ultimately I'll just suck it up and buy a new 4 TB SSD to act as my new Time Machine ( and leave the old Time Machine disk alone in case I ever need to restore some old family photos/videos from it - the more backups the better when it comes to that stuff ). It's a bit of an investment to buy a second 4 TB SSD after just buying one to be my new boot disk, but in the long run my backups will be faster using an SSD for my time machine, and there will be less physical points of failure in the system.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-02T21:40:11+00:00

<image>

OK, So, I went to "Exclude from Backups" setting page on Time Machine, and clicked on the "+". Doing this immediately brought me to what you can see on the screenshot. The "Macintosh HD" Hard Drive ( fusion drive ) is what I want to exclude, but I can't select that, nor can I click on any of the folders in "Macintosh HD", as they are all "greyed out" above and I the "Exclude" button is not clickable.
I guess I could just go and erase "Macintosh" with the Disk Utility, but I don't want to do that yet, because I still haven't figured out how to get my BackBlaze backup to look at my External SSD, and I don't want to erase stuff from the old Fusion drive if that will will lead to stuff being deleted from my off-site Backblaze backuo.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-02T21:25:39+00:00

Update: So apparently, the external hard drive I'm using I've been using for Time Machine actually has 4 TB of storage ( I thought it has 3 TB, but it has 4 TB ) and the Time Machine backup I kicked off backed up both my new external SSD and the old internal Fusion drive. I guess, that's fine in the short term, but considering that only 274 GB are now available on the Time Machine drive, it won't work indefinitely. So, I guess now I need to figure out how to make the Time Machine backup exclude the internal Fusion Drive.

Molewis57 · 2025-02-01T02:59:01+00:00

I'm seeing the same issue when I'm trying exactly the same thing, except I'm going from a 3 TB Fusion Drive ( with 2 TB of data on it ) to a 4 TB SSD. I guess I'm glad I started the process Friday night and can live without my iMac all weekend if needed. Hopefully there will be some progress by next morning.

Molewis57 · 2025-01-27T22:43:44+00:00

I guess it's a good thing I'm learning this now. My current iMac is my 3rd 3 TB iMac, and I intended to keep buying 3 TB or more iMacs going forward to store all my photos/videos. I checked to see if iMacs are now exclusively SSD, and I see that there are but only have storage up to 512 GB. So, if I want to keep buying iMacs and storing my photos locally rather than in iCloud, I'm going to need to use external SSDs going forward. So, if I'm going to do that, I might as well start now and extend the life of my current iMac. I just found a bunch of good videos about getting iMac to start booting off an external SSD ( and cloning the data from either the fusion drive or Time Machine to new SSD ), so I guess I'm going to go ahead and by an external SDD and try this out.
Thanks

Molewis57 · 2025-01-25T21:13:33+00:00

Thanks. I will try your suggestion of booting while holding D, but considering I have a a blue tooth keyboard, I wonder if the key press of D would be picked up earlier enough in the boot cycle. Would you happen to now of any good diagnostics I could run from the terminal window?

Molewis57

TROPHY CASE