1 Family Photo: Elephant Seals

We saw elephant seals last week.

While not quite as big as an elephant, adult male elephant seals grow 4-5 meters long, weighing 1,500-2,300 kilograms — or, if you use American, weigh in somewhere between a Ford Focus and a Cadillac Escalade.

Apparently elephant seals can dive 1 mile deep - Scientists have used them to map the ocean - I've only seen them on land.

Each year, the come ashore to give birth and breed. They do this by beaching themselves in rookeries.

Per Wikipedia:

In this polygynous society, a high-ranking bull can have a harem of 30–100 cows, depending on his size and strength. Males unable to establish harems will wait on the periphery, and will try to mount nearby females. Dominant bulls will disrupt copulations of lower-ranking bulls. They can mount females without interference, but commonly break off to chase off rivals.[29] While fights are not usually to the death, they are brutal and often with significant bloodshed and injury; however, in many cases of mismatched opponents, the younger, less capable males are simply chased away, often to upland dunes. In a lifetime, a successful bull could easily sire over 500 pups. Most copulations in a breeding colony are done by only a small number of males and the rest may never be able to mate with a female.[30] Copulation is most often on land, and takes roughly five minutes.[32] Pups are sometimes crushed during battles between bulls.[28][30]

Elephant seal babies look like oversized, wrinkly pugs. Newborn elephant seals weigh ~30 kilograms — or, if you use American, about as much as an Escalade wheel plus the tire.

Elephant seal rookeries in San Simeon, where we saw them, were only first observed in 1990. I wonder where they went before then.

Still interested? Here's an elephant seal video from our trip.

1 Dad Joke: Ocean Logistics

The joke is mine - came to me while playing outside with Calvin and a bus passed by. (cool story, right?)

Thank Dad[AI]Base (my custom GPT) for the illustration.

I like how most of the fish are smiling, but then two or three are worried about an exam or thinking about how they should be wearing seatbelts or something like that.

Highlights: Sea Fare

Being Alive by Jennifer P. Streit

The Chicago Tribune did not connect these stories; the stories are only linked in my memory.

One of the girls lived in a chaotic household—too many people, too little space, too many problems, too few resources. But this girl had a goal: she would graduate from high school with honors, receive a scholarship to college, and thereby change her life’s trajectory. Noise and confusion filled her home. The apartment was only quiet in the middle of the night when everyone slept. Therefore, each evening this girl set her alarm for 2:00 a.m., got up, and studied during the nightly calm before the daily storm.

The detail I remember about the second girl, in the second news story, is that she had never seen Lake Michigan. She had grown up two or three miles, at most, from the shores of Lake Michigan, and never once in her 18 years had she gazed out across its expanse. She didn’t have the curiosity or gumption to explore or question what was beyond her immediate surroundings.

These girls have become archetypes in my mind.

The guys who lost their assembly line jobs eventually went to coding boot camp and got their IT certificates. Now those coding jobs, too, will disappear. What will those guys do next? I suppose if they’re like the girl who woke up at 2:00 a.m., they will adapt. If they’re like the girl who didn’t venture very far, they probably won’t.

As today’s stable ground erodes, some will clamber over the dunes and envision possibilities on the new beachhead. Some will drag themselves up to the higher ground, only to find themselves unwilling or unable to stake a claim in the new territory. And some will simply sit down on the wet sand while the tides of progress wash them out to sea.

I have a theory that this is why so many Americans are depressed, anxious, stoned, angry, combative, or disconnected. Each new beachhead requires less time to stay alive…and therefore we are faced with more time to be alive.

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (Taylor Pearson's Summary Version)

Playing on one’s inner agency problem can go beyond symmetry: give soldiers no options and see how antifragile they can get. On April 29, 711, the armies of the Arab commander Tarek crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco into Spain with a small army (the name Gibraltar is derived from the Arabic Jabal Tarek, meaning “mount of Tarek”). Upon landing, Tarek had his ships put to the fire. He then made a famous speech every schoolchild memorized during my school days that I translate loosely: “Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy. You are vastly outnumbered. All you have is sword and courage.” And Tarek and his small army took control of Spain. The same heuristic seems to have played out throughout history, from Cortés in Mexico, eight hundred years later, – No options means you have to succeed

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

AGIM has a scene where a restaurant manager, spiteful for being bested as sommelier, orders the wine labels ripped off all the bottles in the cellar, reducing the menu options to "red" and "white".

It leads to reflection on bureaucracy, with tones of Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society:

Whichever wine was within, it was decidedly not identical to its neighbors. On the contrary, the contents of the bottle in his hand was the product of a history as unique and complex as that of a nation, or a man. In its color, aroma, and taste, it would certainly express the idiosyncratic geology and prevailing climate of its home terrain. But in addition, it would express all the natural phenomena of its vintage. In a sip, it would evoke the timing of that winter’s thaw, the extent of that summer’s rain, the prevailing winds, and the frequency of clouds. Yes, a bottle of wine was the ultimate distillation of time and place; a poetic expression of individuality itself. Yet here it was, cast back into the sea of anonymity, that realm of averages and unknowns.

What the Kia-Hyundai Crime Wave Tells Us About the Long-Term Decline in Crime by Alex Tabarrok

Thefts of Kias and Hyundais have seen massive increases–in some places thefts of these cars have increased by a factor of five or ten in just a few years. The reason is simple–most cars today have electronic immobilizers which mean that without the key present these cars can’t easily be hotwired. Some enterprising thieves, however, discovered that Kia and Hyundai neglected to install these devices and they spread the word through Tik-Tok videos about a method to quickly and efficiently jack these cars.

The main less I draw is this: The increase in Kia and Hyundai thefts suggests that the crime wave declined not because the ocean became more gentle but because we built more secure sea walls. The big waves are still out there in the vast ocean and if we lower the walls we shouldn’t be surprised if another big crime wave comes rolling in.

iamJoshKnox Highlight: Overseas!

I published a book!

Thank you everyone who's purchased a copy! I'm overwhelmed by your support and love.

It was fun last week to see the book listed on the real Amazon.
I was shocked this week to find out I'm now an international selling author.

Thank you overseas friends!

Would you like to read my book? Do you know a Young ERP Consultant who might? Reply and I'd love to gift you a copy.

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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #92 (Seaside)

1 Family Photo: Elephant Seals

1 Dad Joke: Ocean Logistics

Highlights: Sea Fare

iamJoshKnox Highlight: Overseas!

Want to Chat?

Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #105 (Science)

Just Joshin' #104 (Raccoon!)

Just Joshin' #103 (Screens)