Geoff Nicholson

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Just been thinking about this a bit more in the past few days. Enjoy.

Well, there's an interesting intersection of pop-culture, history, and numismatics.

The creator of the Broadway musical "Hamilton" (a hip-hop biographic of Alexander Hamilton; catchy!) has retweeted a petition about the plan to remove Hamilton from the ten, instead of getting rid of Jackson on the twenty.

As of this writing, it only has 800-odd signatures, and it needs ten thousand by the end of the month.  This is probably a bad season for this sort of campaign, but I'll do my part to spread the news.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/keep-alexander-hamilton-only-face-10-note

Oh, and about that musical: The lyrics are pretty well analized over on Genius, and even annotated by the author, Lin-Manuel Mranda.  Check 'em out!

http://genius.com/albums/Lin-manuel-miranda/Hamilton-original-broadway-cast-recording

There's far too much hate going around the internet this week. 13 November will be for a while the source of a lot of angst, where in my household that's my annual celebration date.  Complaints about xenophobia, religious priviledge and the like are poisoning the debate, and the echo-chamber that is social media reinforces the lack of empathy and the rigidity of doctrinal purity that has sent political thought in this country back to the stone age... no that would be dismissive of the flexibility of stones.

So I think that everyone should take a load off, enjoy a favourite beverage, and have a nice day.

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If you weren't already aware, there is a campaign for replacing Andrew Jackson on the United States twenty-dollar bill, and replacing him with a historically-significant woman.  The "Women on Twenties" campaign held a poll, and Harriet Tubman won out over Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks.  The campaign got significant traction and then the Treasury Secretary came out and decided to "spark debate" on the matter by suggesting that the ten-dollar bill get a woman.  He then doubled-down on the assertion that since the ten was already up for a redesign they could get the job done faster (released in 2020)... and then suggested that rather than completely remove historically-significant Hamilton (the nominal father of the Federal Reserve system, the Bank of the United States), that whichever woman they selected would share half the currency with Hamilton.

The campaigners were surprised to get only half of what they asked for, and that they had to share it.

But the worst part was that they had chosen Jackson for a reason:  He was a jerk of a president (especially to Native Americans) and was opposed to paper currency... so that he was featured on the second-most-famous and most widely-circulated bill is sort of an affront to his own legacy.  Many people have spoken out on this, most famously Ben Bernanke, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

For his historical significance as the first Secretary of the Treasury, and an advocate of a Bank of the United States, Keep Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill.  And for crying out loud, drop Jackson and put someone more deserving on the twenty.

(For Reference, this is the post I lamented about loosing earlier. I found it!)

It's funny, the person in Mauritius who has my Gmail account associated with their facebook account is getting emails asking them if they know my friends in America. While it's possible, hopefully my friends who are getting asked if they know this person in Mauritius are blocking them as spam as well.

A few people have recently asked me why I left facebook.  Mostly, it was because I was compulsively checking it for no real reason.  Yes, I miss out on the heartwarming stories that people post, and I miss out on hearing what my friends are doing in places far and near.  But I also miss out on tracking cookies, being an outlet for advertising, and siloing my data in Facebook's vaults.

Mostly, I've decided to implement the #indieweb.  This is a set Principles which I think the web is missing out on.  Yes, social media has a method of getting into your life, and I'm trying to back out of that invasiveness.  So if I blog, I blog here first, then syndicate out to other aggregators later (if ever).  I may move from this solution to another one which better integrates my current silos (tumblr and twitter), or return to the days of my PHP coding life where I tried to write my own forums from scratch (probably not).

We'll see how this works out.