11.4.2026

朝携清露行 暮落斜阳归 问霞君远渡 漠寞若浮舟

How to Solve Word Problems Without Getting Confused

By Andrew Collins, Founder of Calc Solver

Word problems confuse many students, and usually the math is not the hard part. The hard part is translating a story into numbers. Once you learn a reliable method for that translation, word problems become ordinary problems with a few extra sentences.

Read Twice Before Writing Anything

The most common mistake is rushing to calculate after one fast read. Read the problem twice. On the first read, get the story: who is involved, what is happening. On the second read, hunt for the math: quantities, relationships, and what is actually being asked. Two slow reads save far more time than one fast read followed by a wrong solution.

Underline the Numbers and the Question

Mark every number and its unit: 12 apples, 3 boxes, 4 dollars per box. Then mark the exact question — what single value must you find? Many students solve for the wrong thing because they never isolated the question. Writing the numbers and the question separately turns a paragraph into a clear starting point.

Translate Words Into Math

Math has a vocabulary. “Total” and “combined” usually mean add. “Difference” means subtract. “Each” and “per” usually mean multiply or divide. “Twice as many” means multiply by two. Learning these signal words turns translation from guessing into a routine. When a sentence confuses you, rewrite it in your own words first, then translate that simpler version.

Solve in Small Steps

Big problems become easy when split into small steps. If a problem has several stages, solve one stage at a time and label each result. Do not try to hold the whole chain in your head. Write each step down, even if it feels obvious. Written steps are easy to check; mental chains are easy to lose.

Check Against the Story

When you get an answer, read it back into the story. Does it make sense? If a problem asks for the number of students and your answer is 2.5, something went wrong — people do not come in fractions. If an answer should be smaller than the starting amount but yours is bigger, recheck your operation. This final reality check catches more errors than any other habit.

Practice With Steps

Word problems improve with practice, but only if you practice the method, not just the answers. A free step-by-step platform like calc solver shows the full working of a problem, so you can compare your translation and steps with a correct solution and see exactly where your reasoning diverged. Read twice, translate carefully, solve in steps, and check against the story. Follow that routine and word problems stop being confusing — they become the most satisfying problems to solve.

De Bond Tegen Efficiëntie Nieuwsbrief

4,5

Welkomstwoord

Hoi

Eindelijk is het ons tegen heug en meug gelukt om weer een nieuwsbrief samen te stellen en verzenden naar ongewenste berichten electronische postvakjes van al onze 110 miljoen leden en vele anderen wiens IP adressen en toebehoren toevallig of met opzet zin in ons bezit zijn gekomen. We hebben alle nieuwtjes waarschijnlijk verzonnen maar ze zijn daarom voor uwer brein niet minder nieuw, zo zit dat nou eenmaal.

Natuurlijk hebben we de afgelopen periode, tussen deze en de eerdere nieuwsbrief niet altijd stil gezeten, we hebben het nodige gedaan om ons het werk te beletten of juist niet, we deden aan afleiding, willekeurige promotie en deelden prijzen uit en we verklaarden voor gek. Dat is wat we doen om te doen alsof we niets zinvols doen met onze energie, de energie waarvan amper genoeg kan worden opgewekt om zo te werken zoals wij werken, omslachtig dus.

De Niet Efficiënte Loterij

De rede achter deze brief, dit belangrijke bericht voor u, ons alom gewaardeerde lid, u, de belangrijkste persoon voor ons voortbestaan, die soms wel soms niet contributie betaald, op tijd of veel te laat, het is ons om het even, te laat levert echter wel meer activiteit op. De bron van deze mail is de voorlopig eenmalig georganiseerde grote niet efficiënte loterij. Wij hebben bij deze mail het lot nummer bijgeschreven onder de kop. Elk lid, alle 110 miljoen leden, hebben zo'n nummer, een 1, 2, 3 of een 4. Straks trekken wij de loten voor onze vijf hoofdprijzen waarbij we na het trekken van de vier lootjes deze weer terug gooien in de grabbel zak en nog een keer een 1 2 3 of 4 trekken voor prijs vijf, zodat ook deze hoofdprijs in u handen valt.

De prijzen zijn

Prijs 1 – 10 miljoen Smægmåånse Døllār

Prijs 2 – Een dagtochtje met de kinderen of huisdieren voor vele miljoenen winnaars op 5 december naar de Kwakkelwinter Efteling (met eigen vervoer, transport kosten kunt u eventueel terugkrijgen, mits, zie bijlage 5 tot en met 15 voor alle regels waaraan u moet voldoen om gebruik te kunnen maken voor deze regeling)

Prijs 3 – Een make-up setje voor huiskatten van ons eigen merk OnEviviciëntie

Prijs 4 – 10000 Smægmåånse Døllār

Prijs 5 – Een lidmaatschap op ons Bond Tegen Efficiëntie Films en Serie kanaal, een dankzij onze sponsorbijdragen door werkloze losers gegraven kanaal gevuld met kringloop dvd's waarin u kunt vissen naar afgedankte series en films op schijf of vhs.

De kans is dus heel klein dat u niks wint, er zijn maar 2 mails verzonden met nummer 6 in de header en maar 1 met 4,5, alleen zij missen een geweldige hoofdprijs, ze gaan niet naar de efteling, maken hun poes of kater niet op, vissen wel zeker naast ons kanaal en krijgen geen centjes, dat is nou eenmaal hun lot, zoals bepaald door ons.

Ik denk dat u na het lezen van dit bericht wel heel gelukkig bent. U hebt iets goeds gewonnen en alleen maar omdat u bent vergeten u lidmaatschap niet te verlengen of omdat wij u aanvraag omdat te doen niet serieus hebben genomen. Sommige zaken zijn ook gewoon niet te doen, zeker nu het onze hackers steeds vaker lukt zichzelf te hacken en als gevolg daarvan zijn wij niet langer in staat onze mogelijk aanwezige administratie te ordenen op de meest onlogische wijze.

De administratie

Over administratie en orde gesproken wij hebben besloten leden niet langer te ordenen op hoogte van hun inkomen of op het aantal kinderen maar op het aantal letters in hun voornaam. Dit omzetproces heeft de maatschappij een poosje heel veel werkplaatsen opgeleverd, wij hebben daarom besloten iets dergelijks voorlopig niet weer te doen.

Bestuursveranderingen

Het bestuur is nog hetzelfde als bij de laatste nieuwsbrief, dit is trouwens voor het eerst sinds de oprichting van onze nieuwsbrief redactie, wel hebben we besloten dat de voorzitter nu de taken doet van de secretaris, de secretaris die van de penningmaestro en die weer van de voorzitter en de vice voorzitter maakt de wc schoon, zo houden we het voor iedereen spannend.

De agenda

Na veel soebatten hebben we eindelijk de nieuwe agenda ingevoerd. Een jaar bestaat vooralsnog uit vijf partities elk opgedeeld in 3 4 of 5 stukjes en elk van die stukjes in minsten 11 onderdelen, ieder onder bevat 56 cellen en tijdens zo'n vast jaar komt er elke dag wat in zo'n cel en gaat er wat uit.

De cel structuur aka de evenementen agenda

We hebben het volgende gedaan en het andere gaan we doen, zijn het van plan of hebben het overwogen, sommige staan zelfs al vast.

De bonte ochtend, partitie 4, stukje 3, onderdeel 16, cellen 23-45

Een heerlijke ochtend vol toneel, rollenspel, zang en dans en nog veel meer vertier allemaal georganiseerd in het medisch centrum van Smægmå buiten hun medeweten om, kom ook.

Eens ooit, documentaire projectie

De film avond waarin de nog te maken documentaire over de ongeschikte mensen van de afdeling complete infrastructuur bezig met lijden aan hun eigen werkzaamheden te zien zal zijn.

Bond Tegen Efficiëntie Kermissie, partitie 5, stukje 1, onderdeel 13, 14 en 16, alle cellen

Ook dit jaar trachten we onze kermissie te laten draaien, wentelen, stijgen, dalen, hobbelen, botsen, kermen, jengelen en tieren zodat iedereen ongeacht alles het ontzettend naar zijn zin heeft als ze het tenminste kunnen ontlopen.

Er was eends

De volgende drie evenementen zijn al geweest en kunnen daarom beter niet weer bezocht worden tenzij u graag teleurgesteld omloopt, kom er dan vooral op terug.

1 De vliegtuigtellingsdag boven het meest kwetsbare natuurreservaat van Smægmå.

2 De wedstrijd vijf dubbelparkeren voor pakketbezorgers bij en rondom ons hoofdkantoor

3 De bond tegen efficiëntie ledenvergadering rondom de huidige stand van zaken

Mededelingen

In de store is de nieuwe winter catalogus verdwenen, zou de persoon die dit schitterende drukwerk onder in zijn lade heeft liggen dit kunnen melden bij de afdeling winter catalogi zodat we de fans hiervan, de catalogus, niet de afdeling, het boekwerk daar bij u op kantoor kunnen inzien.

Het postvakje van lid 344246 zit te vol, is het mogelijk dat u het vakje groter maakt zodat het minder vol lijkt?

Er zit in de sector 56 een vertraging van 20 minuten tussen de verzending van de nieuwsbrief en de ontvangst, dit komt door nalatigheid van een persoon of meerdere.

Het weer veroorzaakt mogelijkerwijs hinder.

De contributie gaat voor sommige leden flink omhoog voor anderen niet.

Tot zover alle niet ter zake doende mededelingen.

U kunt niet reageren op de nieuwsbrief, wij zien het nut daarvan niet in omdat dat ons beter bevalt.

Ik dank u namens de hele Bond voor het bezitten van een malebox namens,

V

Penningmaestro Bond Tegen Efficiëntie

The town where Christophe Bartels had been the Lutheran Pastor

Wartburg-Kirchdorf Primary School, nestled in the small town of Wartburg, was where I spent my formative years from Class 1 to Standard 5. Those years were filled with quirky discoveries, unforgettable characters, and moments that shaped me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until much later. We wore Khakis clothes and Bata shoes.

On my very first day of school, I learned something shocking: my name wasn’t BB, as I’d always thought. It was Ronald. Imagine the confusion of a six-year-old, striding into school thinking he’s one person, only to be told he’s someone else entirely. That set the tone for the wild ride that was primary school.

Our Class 1 teacher, Miss Hopkins, was the stuff of legends. She wore mini skirts and was, without question, the hottest teacher I ever had, sorry, Jacqui Badenhorst from Grey, you’re a close second. Miss Hopkins was kind, but I once had a disagreement with her that I couldn’t articulate. Language failed me, so I did what any frustrated kid might: I kicked her. Not my proudest moment, but it’s a memory that sticks.

I taught myself English by devouring books. The school library became my domain, I read it shelf by shelf, book by book, until I’d conquered the lot. When I ran out of library books, I scrounged for anything I could find, from dog-eared paperbacks to whatever was lying around at home. Reading wasn’t just a pastime; it was my window to the world.

Music class, however, was not my forte. In Standard 3, the German music teacher, fed up with me for reasons I still don’t understand, bellowed “Raus!” and kicked me out. I stood outside, bewildered, until the principal, Mr. Garz, spotted me. He’d gone to school with my dad, so instead of a lecture, he took me to his office and dialed my dad on his old Siemens Bakelite phone. Those things were so loud I could hear every word. “Ernie,” he said, “your youngest boy was kicked out of class.” “Which class?” my dad asked. “Music,” said Garz. “Don’t worry,” my dad replied coolly, “call me when it’s Maths or Science.” Garz hung up, looked at me, and said, “Your dad says you don’t need to go to music class.” From then on, during music lessons, I’d climb trees instead, my own personal rebellion against rhythm and melody.

One of my favorite memories is building a robot with my friend Derek for a school project. We rigged it up with flashlights and walkie-talkies for control, feeling like mad scientists. Derek, ever the dreamer, fancied himself a spoon-bender like Uri Geller, though I don’t recall him bending much of anything.

Rugby was another adventure. I played as a loose forward, but our team got absolutely klapped by the city schools. The scores were so lopsided they were downright embarrassing, but we kept at it, dirt on our faces and pride in our hearts.

Behind the town hall, I had my first brushes with romance, kissing two girls, Rene and Louis. Those moments felt daring and monumental at the time, though I suspect they were more innocent than my memory makes them out to be.

My best mates were Kim and Karen, with Ivan and Gavin close behind. We were a tight crew, navigating the chaos of school life together. I’d pile into a yellow VW Kombi to get to school with my family and the neighbours, the Seeles, me crammed in the “dog box” at the back with my brown suitcase, a flimsy thing made of hardened cardboard with a lock that broke if you looked at it wrong. Eventually, I upgraded to a canvas rucksack, which felt like a major life improvement.

Lunch was always the same: brown bread and jam. I’d eye the town kids’ fancy sandwiches—white bread slathered with peanut butter or Marmite—and occasionally swipe one during break in the quad. It was a small act of defiance against the class divide I sensed even then.

One day, some older English immigrant kids at school tried to bully me. I told my older brother, who rounded up our cousins, and they sorted those yobbos out proper, moered them stukkend, as we’d say. The principal called my dad again, but Dad, known in town as Mastelek for his fearsome reputation, brushed it off. He even threatened to come down and deal with the bullies himself. Garz had a tough time with him.

Those years at Wartburg-Kirchdorf were a mix of mischief, discovery, and small-town grit. From learning my real name to dodging music class in favor of tree-climbing, from robot-building to rugby defeats, those days shaped me in ways I’m still unpacking. They were raw, real, and utterly unforgettable.

The Projector Days at Primary School

Growing up, I was lucky to get a hands-on education in some unexpected skills, one of which was mastering the art of the film projector. My parents’ friend Harry, a wizard with woodworking tools and a knack for all things mechanical, used to visit our farm with his trusty projector in tow. He’d set it up in our dining room, and we’d transform the blank wall into a flickering cinema screen, watching old movies under his patient guidance. Harry taught me how to thread the film, adjust the focus, and keep the reels spinning smoothly, a skill that, unbeknownst to me, would soon make me a minor legend at school.

Our primary school was a modest affair, a cluster of dated asbestos buildings huddled around a brick classroom block that formed a quad at the heart of it all. The classrooms were functional, a bit weathered, but they held a certain charm. The real magic, though, happened when the projector came out. I don’t know how it happened, but word got around that I knew my way around the machine, and before long, I was the designated “projector nerd.” Whenever a teacher wanted to show a film, I’d be summoned to set up the clunky old beast, threading the film with a mix of pride and nerves, hoping it wouldn’t jam mid-reel.

We watched a lot of nature films, grainy documentaries about African wildlife or deep-sea creatures that captivated us with their otherworldly strangeness. I can still hear the whir of the projector and the collective gasps of my classmates as a lion took down a gazelle or a whale breached the ocean’s surface. One standout memory was watching sports highlights, particularly the grainy footage of Gareth Edwards’ legendary try for the Barbarians against the All Blacks in 1973. The quad echoed with cheers as we relived that moment of rugby brilliance, even if most of us barely understood the game.

There were less thrilling moments, too. Someone, probably an overambitious English teacher, thought it’d be a grand idea to show us Shakespeare adaptations. Those were met with stifled yawns and restless fidgeting. The Bard’s words might have soared on stage, but on a flickering projector screen in a stuffy classroom, they bored the hell out of everyone. Still, there was something special about those days, the ritual of dimming the lights, the clatter of the projector, and the way we’d all gather in that asbestos-lined room, transported, however briefly, to another world.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

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Significant Havoc In Technology does happen!

In my years managing network infrastructure, I’ve seen outages caused by everything from human error to nature’s wrath. Each incident was a puzzle, often with a solution as bizarre as the problem itself.

At WBS, we had a microwave link that kept dropping, leaving everyone stumped for weeks. Engineers scratched their heads, pointing fingers at equipment configs and signal interference. Then, one day, someone noticed a massive crane on the neighboring construction site. Its loaded bucket swung directly into the line of sight (LOS) of our link every time it rotated. A classic case of “moerse” machinery reminding us to check the physical layer first.

Another time, we had intermittent failures at a high site. The IP Core team blamed the radio crew, and the radio crew fired back. Frustrated, I sent one of my guys out to investigate—genchi genbutsu, go and see for yourself. What he found was a new, hulking generator installed by the property owner. Its exhaust pipe was dumping burnt diesel fumes straight into the air inlet of our equipment container. The inside was coated in a grimy layer of soot, frying our gear intermittently. We had to pull everything out, clean it, and relocate the air intake to stop the madness.

Then there was the MTN Gallo Manor data centre fiasco. The whole network went dark one day, and we scrambled to figure out why. We had redundancy with cabinets at Teraco, but our DNS guy had fibbed about having dual servers. In a pinch, we pointed everything to Google’s 8.8.8.8, and, as they say, Bob’s your uncle—back online. The root cause? ICASA, armed with a court order to remove an unlicensed radio, mistakenly yanked our fibre switch instead. The data centre manager was utterly useless, letting ICASA run rampant without question. He even tried to block us from accessing our own racks. Total chop. We didn’t stick around—moved everything to a new facility in Midrand.

Perhaps the wildest incident was at the Toyota factory in Durban. The network kept failing, and no one could pinpoint why. I went down to check it out and found the culprit: pigeons. Their acidic droppings had eaten through the roof of the network rack, seeping onto the switches below. The corrosion was wreaking havoc. Who knew pigeon poop could take down a network?

These outages taught me one thing: never underestimate the chaos of the real world. From cranes to exhaust fumes to rogue regulators and pigeon poop, the network game keeps you humble.

The Wild Days at MTN Gallo Manor Data Centre

The MTN Gallo Manor data centre was a beast of its own kind, a place where chaos and ingenuity danced a gritty tango. It was supposed to be a fortress of technology, a humming hub of connectivity, but more often than not, it felt like a house of cards teetering on the edge of collapse. Outages were as common as morning coffee, and the whole operation seemed to limp along on hope and duct tape.

The guy in charge—let’s just say competence wasn’t his strong suit. He’d strut around with a clipboard and a scowl, but when the chips were down, he was about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. The real trouble, though, was the infrastructure. Power continuity was a pipe dream. When Eskom’s grid inevitably flickered out, we’d all hold our breath, waiting for the backup generators to roar to life. Too often, they didn’t. Those big diesel beasts, meant to save the day, would sit silent, leaving the entire data centre plunged into darkness. Servers whined to a halt, and we’d be left scrambling in the gloom, cursing under our breath.

Then there were the water chillers. Poorly installed and barely maintained, they were a disaster waiting to happen. They’d overload circuits like clockwork, tripping distribution boards and sending us into another round of firefighting. It was as if the whole setup was conspiring against us, daring us to keep the lights on.

But we weren’t the type to roll over. When the data centre failed us, we took matters into our own hands. We became the data centre cowboys, riding in with our own solutions. Picture this: flatbed trucks rolling up with portable generators, their engines growling where the centre’s diesels wouldn’t. We’d snake power cables through emergency exits, rigging up our critical equipment to keep the show running. It was messy, it was unorthodox, but it worked. We’d huddle in the server room, the hum of our makeshift power supply drowning out the silence of the failed systems, and we’d grin like outlaws who’d just pulled off a heist.

Those days at Gallo Manor were a trial by fire. The place was a mess, but it taught us resilience, improvisation, and a certain stubborn pride. We kept the data flowing, not because the systems were sound, but because we refused to let them win. We were the cowboys of the data centre, and in that chaotic, flickering world, we carved out our own legend.

When Water Waged War on Our Networks

In the high-stakes world of telecommunications and IT, network outages are the stuff of nightmares—those invisible gremlins that can bring entire operations to a screeching halt. Over my career, I’ve battled my fair share of them, from rogue software bugs to power failures, but none were quite as dramatic (or soggy) as the times when Mother Nature, or rather faulty plumbing, decided to turn our workplaces into impromptu aquariums. These floods didn’t just soak the floors; they drowned our networks, forcing us to improvise, adapt, and ultimately rebuild. Two incidents stand out vividly in my memory, both involving burst water systems that turned the office space into watery wastelands.

The first deluge hit while I was at Datavia in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. It was a late-night grind; I was deep into coding my branch line management information program, tweaking algorithms under the hum of fluorescent lights. Around midnight, I heard it—a persistent rushing sound, like a heavy downpour. Assuming it was just another stormy evening in the city, I ignored it at first, focused on my screen. But the noise didn’t let up. Curiosity finally pulled me from my desk to the window, where I peered out expecting sheets of rain. Nothing. The streets were dry and there was no rain. Puzzled, I ventured out of our office area toward the lifts, only to be met by a surreal sight: water gushing from the ceiling like a broken fire sprinkler on steroids.

I hurried down the stairs, my shoes squelching on increasingly wet steps, and emerged into the foyer, which had transformed into a veritable swimming pool. Water lapped at the reception desk, papers floating like lily pads. Outside, the security team stood helplessly, watching the chaos. “A pipe burst upstairs,” one explained, phone in hand. “We’re calling a plumber.” I couldn’t believe it. “Why not just shut off the main water supply?” I asked, incredulous. They shrugged—nobody knew where the shutoff valve was. With the building flooding and no immediate fix in sight, I decided it was time to call it a night. I waded to my car, drove home, and collapsed into bed, leaving the mess behind.

The aftermath was a week-long ordeal. The water had seeped into everything: walls, floors, and crucially, our communications equipment. Servers shorted out, cables corroded, and the network went dark. We spent days drying out the space, replacing soaked hardware, and rerouting connections. It was a stark reminder of how vulnerable our digital lifelines are to the physical world—one burst pipe, and poof, connectivity vanished. But we emerged stronger, with better backups and a newfound appreciation for building maintenance manuals.

Not long after, fate decided to test my flood-resilience again at iBurst. I arrived at the office one crisp morning, coffee in hand, ready to dive into the day’s tasks. But as I pushed open the door, I was greeted by pandemonium: ceiling boards lay in sodden heaps on desks, papers plastered to surfaces like wet confetti, and puddles everywhere. It looked like a bomb had gone off—if the bomb was made of water. Turns out, the holding pool on the roof had ruptured overnight, sending a tsunami cascading through the building. The deluge had short-circuited the electrical systems, tripping the power and plunging us into darkness amid the damp.

We scrambled into action. The power was restored after a few tense hours of electricians poking at fuses and drying out panels, but the network outage lingered as we assessed the damage to routers and switches. For weeks, we worked under an open sky of exposed beams and wiring, no ceiling boards to shield us from the fluorescent glare or the occasional drip from lingering moisture. It was makeshift office life at its finest—desks relocated & fans blasting to dry things out. Yet, in that stripped-down environment, creativity flourished; we bonded over the absurdity, turning potential disaster into a story of resilience. The full repairs took time, but the experience hammered home a key lesson: in tech, as in life, adaptability is your best defense against the unexpected.

These watery woes were more than mere inconveniences; they were humbling encounters with chaos, underscoring how interconnected our digital and physical worlds truly are. In the end, they didn’t just disrupt networks, they rebuilt my perspective on preparedness, one soggy step at a time.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Coming of Age Under Apartheid’s Shadow

Looking back growing up in the rolling hills of the Natal Midlands during the 1970s, it’s astonishing how insulated I was from the brutal machinery of apartheid. I grew up in a world of open fields, family farms, and the simple rhythms of rural life—riding my golden Raleigh bicycle for hours, exploring babbling streams and koppies, blissfully unaware that the very landscape I traversed was carved up by invisible lines of race and restriction. Apartheid wasn’t a word that echoed in our dinner table conversations; it was more like a distant hum, something adults navigated without explanation. My parents, like many white South Africans of their generation, shielded us from the ugliness, or perhaps they themselves had normalized it. But cracks inevitably appeared, and my first real brush with the system came on a sunny weekend afternoon in Greytown.

I was on my prized golden Raleigh bicycle—a gleaming symbol of freedom, with its shiny chrome and sturdy frame. Eager to test its limits, I pedaled off toward the edges of town, drawn by curiosity to the black township that lay just beyond the familiar white neighborhoods. The township was a world apart: dusty roads lined with modest homes, children playing in the streets, the air thick with the smells of cooking fires and communal life. I didn’t think twice about cycling through; to me, it was just another adventure. But adventure turned to confusion when a police van screeched to a halt beside me. Two stern-faced cops in dark blue uniforms stepped out, their faces etched with a mix of annoyance and authority.

“Oi, what are you doing here, laatjie?” one barked, his voice sharp as a whip. “This area’s off-limits to whites like you. Get out now.”

They escorted me back to Greytown, their grip firm on me as if I were some wayward skelm. I was shaken, my heart pounding, but more puzzled than scared. Why couldn’t I ride there? What invisible wall had I crossed? That evening, I recounted the story to my grandfather Ludwig, a stoic German whose ancestors had settled in South Africa generations previously, building a life from the soil. He sat in his worn armchair and listened with a furrowed brow.

“Apartheid, junge,” he said slowly, as if weighing each word. “It’s the law. Whites here, blacks there. But...” He trailed off, his eyes distant. We talked in circles—me probing with insistent “why”s, him offering half-answers laced with resignation. It was my first inkling that the world wasn’t as open as my bicycle rides suggested; it was segmented, policed, and profoundly unfair.

A few years later, another layer peeled back during a trip with my father to New Hanover, that sleepy town close to our farm. We were visiting his friend, the local magistrate, a man of influence, with a wood-paneled office that smelled of polished leather and old books. I fidgeted in the corner as my dad leaned over his desk, voice low. “I need a permit,” he explained. “For a church service in Zululand. It’s the centenary of Christophe Bartels founding the mission there, 100 years since he brought the Bible to those parts.”

The magistrate nodded, stamping forms with bureaucratic efficiency. Permits? For church? On the drive home, the sugarcane fields blurring past, I couldn’t hold back. “Dad, why do we need permission to go to church? How is that Christianity?”

He gripped the steering wheel a bit tighter, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s the Group Areas Act, BB. Whites can’t just wander into native areas without reason. The government controls movement, ”His explanation was patient but laced with a weariness that hinted at deeper doubts. We talked about it: me pushing against the absurdity, and he agreed. That conversation lingered, planting seeds of unease. How could faith, something so universal, be gated by race?

And then there was PW Botha on the television, State President Pieter Willem Botha, with his infamous finger-wagging speeches. “Met sy vinger in die lug,” as we Afrikaners would say, jabbing the air like a weapon. I’d catch glimpses of him during the evening news, his face flushed, railing against communists, terrorists, and the “swart gevaar.” It was ugly, visceral, a man embodying the fortress mentality of white South Africa. His words dripped with defiance, promising reform while clinging to power. To me, he represented everything rigid and unyielding about the world I was inheriting.

During my teenage years at Grey College in Bloemfontein, those seeds of doubt had begun to sprout. Grey had a tradition of both Afrikaans and other European based nations—rugby fields, strict discipline, and a curriculum heavy on history that glossed over inconvenient truths. Heck, I was Afrikaans, German and Scottish. A true brak! A rooinek one. The school library was relatively small, a few dusty shelves that couldn’t satisfy my voracious reading habit. So instead, every Saturday, I’d bolt to the city centre library, a grander affair with towering stacks and endless possibilities. I’d arrive first thing, arms soon laden with books—adventures, histories, philosophies—that would have given PW heart palpitations. I devoured works by banned authors: Nadine Gordimer’s tales of fractured lives, Alan Paton’s cries for justice, even smuggled copies of anti-apartheid tracts by Breyten Breytenbach. Those pages opened windows to the injustices I’d glimpsed but not fully understood.

Outside the library, under the shade of magnificent trees, were benches overlooking the main Calvinist church—a serene spot with its white steeple piercing the blue Free State sky. I’d sit there, lost in my latest find, the world fading away. One Saturday, I noticed a black teenager on the steps nearby, not daring to claim a bench. The signs were unspoken but clear: benches for whites only. He looked about my age, dressed neatly, eyes scanning the library doors expectantly. I watched for a moment, the unfairness gnawing at me. Then, in a small act of rebellion, I gathered my books and joined him on the steps.

We struck up a conversation—awkward at first, bridged by shared youth. His name was Thabo, and he explained that a boy from Grey was inside, borrowing books on his behalf. Blacks weren’t allowed library cards in that whites-only facility. Minutes later, the Grey boy emerged, handing over a stack of novels and schoolbooks. The three of us sat there, mulling over the absurdity: why should knowledge be rationed by skin colour? It was a quiet moment of solidarity, but it ignited something in me—a personal defiance against the system. That was Grey and I could help but be impressed by what my fellow brak had the conviction to do.

The next year, my fellow Greybrak approached me: “It’s my last year; I won’t be here. Will you take my library card and keep loaning books for Thabo?” Without hesitation, I agreed. It became my ritual—selecting titles I thought he’d enjoy, smuggling them out under the guise of my own borrowings. It felt like my own way of flipping the bird at PW and his wagging finger, a tiny subversion in a sea of compliance.

Any then there were some who realized my thinking and referred to me as a Kommunis. I’d burst out laughing and asked if they had they read any books about it or only seen PW on TV? I was far from a Kommunis. I was more like a Victorian liberal.

That act led to more. One weekend, Thabo invited me to a massive Kaizer Chiefs versus Orlando Pirates soccer match at the Free State Stadium. I was one of the few whites in a sea of black fans—Greeks and Portuguese sprinkled in, but overwhelmingly a black domain. The energy was electric: chants thundering, vuvuzelas blaring, the crowd a living wave of passion. Soccer was the black man’s game, raw and communal, while rugby remained the white preserve, with a smattering of Cape Coloured players. That divide mirrored everything—sports as apartheid in microcosm. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Thabo, cheering amid the roar, I felt the thrill of crossing lines, but also the weight of how deeply segregated our lives were.

Politics, though, has a way of evolving while staying stubbornly the same. The seismic shifts of 1994—the end of apartheid, Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation—promised a new dawn. We voted, we celebrated, and the old guard crumbled. Yet, decades on, under President Cyril Ramaphosa, the system feels eerily familiar. Corruption scandals, economic inequality, and a government that prioritizes power over people—it’s as if PW’s authoritarianism has merely changed colors. Neither regime aligns with my morals or integrity; both sacrifice justice for expediency, leaving the vulnerable behind.

Is that the essence of being liberal? Not slotting neatly into the binary of left or right, but occupying the uncomfortable middle ground, like Sir George Grey himself—governor, explorer, a man disliked by settlers and indigenous alike for his attempts at balance. In apartheid South Africa, my small acts of resistance weren’t revolutionary; they were liberal impulses—questioning authority, seeking common humanity, refusing to accept division as destiny. Today, that same spirit keeps me at odds with the status quo, a perpetual outsider in a world that demands allegiance to one side or the other. Perhaps that’s the true mark of a liberal: not fitting in but standing firm anyway.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

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Echoes of Defiance Across the Ages

In the quiet hush of a storm-lashed evening, an old potato farmer named Mastelek sat by a flickering fire, his gnarled hands tracing the scars of a life spent wrestling the land. He was a rare man with vision in only one eye. Before him sprawled a tattered journal, its pages yellowed like ancient parchment, filled with sketches and scribbles of men and women who had stared into the abyss of their own frailties and emerged as titans. Mastelek had collected these stories over decades, not as mere facts, but as lanterns to guide himself, reminders that the human spirit, bent but never broken, forges its own path through the tempests of fate. As the wind howled outside, he began to read aloud, his voice a gravelly rumble, weaving the tales into a tapestry that spanned millennia. Each hero's journey built upon the last, a chain of resilience teaching that impairment is not a chain, but a chisel; that twists of destiny sharpen the soul; and that true greatness blooms not despite our wounds, but through them.

Echoes from the Dawn | The Blind Bards Who Shaped the Soul

The story began in the sun-baked cradle of antiquity, where the first lesson whispered: Vision lost need not dim the fire of imagination. Long before empires rose or fell, there wandered a blind poet named Homer, his staff tapping the dusty paths of ancient Greece like the heartbeat of the gods. Stricken with blindness in his youth—perhaps by the cruel hand of fate or the gods' own jest—Homer could not see the crashing waves of Troy or the wine-dark sea. Yet in the velvet darkness of his world, he conjured visions that would etch themselves into the marrow of Western literature. For nine years, he sang of heroes clashing in the Iliad, of Achilles' rage and Hector's honor, and then, in the Odyssey, of Odysseus's cunning voyage home, a tale of endurance that mirrored his own unyielding spirit. Homer's twist? He was no solitary sage but a wanderer who gathered songs from sailors and slaves, blind to prejudice, his voice a bridge between the mortal and divine. Through him, Mastelek murmured, we learn that sight is fleeting, but the eye of the mind endures, illuminating truths for generations yet unborn.

Centuries later, as the Renaissance stirred like a phoenix from Europe's ashes, another sightless seer rose to challenge the heavens themselves. Galileo Galilei, born in 1564 amid the flickering candlelight of Pisa, watched the stars through a homemade telescope until his vision faltered, impaired by relentless nights peering into infinity, eventually leaving him blind in his twilight years. The father of modern science, he mapped the moons of Jupiter and whispered that the Earth danced around the Sun, not the other way around. But his twist cut deeper: a defiant spark that ignited the fury of the Catholic Church, those guardians of “blind belief in myths.” House arrest could not silence him; from his villa in Arcetri, he dictated treatises that shattered the geocentric chains, proving that questioning dogma is the boldest sight of all. Galileo's life taught that even in darkness, the pursuit of truth blinds the oppressors, forging paths where none existed.

Flames of Creation | Artists Who Painted with Their Scars

From the forge of inquiry, the narrative flowed into the vivid strokes of artistry, where the second lesson emerged: Pain is the palette from which masterpieces are born. Claude Monet, the gentle giant of 19th-century France, began his days chasing light across lily ponds, but cataracts clouded his world, leaving him with sight in only one eye by the 1920s. The founder of Impressionism, a movement that captured fleeting moments in dappled color, painted through the haze, his water lilies blooming in furious abstraction as if to mock his failing gaze. His twist? In his final years, he underwent risky surgeries, slashing canvases in frustration, only to repaint them with renewed fury, birthing the ethereal works that would define a leading art movement. Monet's canvases remind us that when the world blurs, we must paint our own clarity, turning limitation into luminous legacy.

Across the Atlantic, in the vibrant chaos of early 20th-century Mexico, Frida Kahlo embodied this truth in flesh and fury. Polio twisted her right leg as a child, leaving her with a limp that echoed her unquenchable fire, but it was a devastating bus accident at 18 that shattered her spine, pierced her foot with iron, and confined her to months of agonizing bedrest. Yet from that crucible, she emerged as an iconic painter, her self-portraits a riot of surreal agony and Aztec defiance—eyebrows arched like thunder, flowers crowning wounds that wept. Her twist? Married to the muralist Diego Rivera in a tempestuous union of betrayal and passion, Frida channeled heartbreak into art that screamed against colonial shadows and female erasure. Through Frida, the lesson deepens: Wounds are not endings but invitations to rebirth, where the body breaks but the spirit soars, crafting beauty from the bones of suffering.

And oh, Leonardo da Vinci—the illegitimate son of a Tuscan notary and a peasant girl, born in 1452 without the silver spoon of legitimacy, yet the cornerstone of the High Renaissance. No physical scar marked him, but the twist of his birth cast him as an outsider, fueling a mind that danced across disciplines: painter of the enigmatic Mona Lisa, engineer of flying machines, thinker whose notebooks brimmed with inventions centuries ahead. His impairment? The societal scorn for bastards, which he alchemized into genius, dissecting cadavers by moonlight and sketching the Vitruvian Man as a hymn to human potential. Da Vinci whispers that origins do not define us; they ignite the polymath's flame, proving the greatest minds are forged in the margins.

Tides of Command | Warriors and Leaders Who Navigated the Storm

As the tales swelled like ocean swells, they crashed into the arenas of power and peril, unveiling the third lesson: Command is claimed not by perfection, but by unyielding will. In the salty gales of the Napoleonic Wars, Admiral Horatio Nelson stood as a one-eyed, one-armed, one-lunged colossus—his right eye blinded by a skirmish in Corsica, his arm amputated after a futile assault on Tenerife, and his lung pierced by grapeshot at Toulon. Yet he was history's greatest sailor, shattering the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805 with maneuvers as bold as his love letters to Lady Hamilton. His twist? A flamboyant dandy who signaled “England expects every man to do his duty” while his body betrayed him, dying atop the Victory's bloodied deck, a hero's end that saved Britain from invasion. Nelson teaches that fragments of flesh cannot capsize the ship of destiny; true admirals steer by the stars within.

Echoing across centuries, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wheeled into the White House in 1933, his legs paralyzed by polio since 1921, a secret veiled by fireside chats and iron braces hidden beneath tailored suits. Unable to walk, he led America through the Great Depression's abyss and the thunder of World War II, birthing the New Deal and forging the United Nations from wartime ashes. His twist? A patrician playboy struck down in his prime, who turned isolation into empathy, quipping, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR's legacy illuminates that thrones are not for the able-bodied alone; vulnerability forges the strongest alliances, lifting nations when one man cannot stand.

In the smoke-choked skies of World War II, Douglas Bader defied gravity twice over—his legs severed in a 1931 flying accident, replaced by tin prosthetics that clanked like medals. Kicked out of the RAF as a cripple, he clawed back in 1939, becoming an ace with 22 kills, leading the “Legless Wonder” squadron in the Battle of Britain. His twist? Shot down over France, he evaded capture on those artificial limbs, only to be recaptured and told by Luftwaffe doctors, “We know who you are, but we don't know how you do it.” Bader's roar, that “rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men”—teaches that wings are earned, not given; amputation of limb pales before the severing of doubt.

Harmonies of the Heart | Voices That Shattered Silence

From the roar of battle, the narrative softened into song, the fourth lesson ringing clear: The purest notes arise from silenced chords. Roy Orbison, the bespectacled cowboy of West Texas, born in 1936, veiled his vision problems behind dark sunglasses, turning nearsightedness into an aura of mystery. With a voice like velvet midnight, he crooned anthems—”Oh, Pretty Woman,” “Crying”—that tugged at the world's heartstrings, his falsetto a cry from the soul of a man who saw beauty in shadows. His twist? A gentle giant who lost his wife and two sons to tragedy, yet rose from grief's ashes with operatic ballads that made rock weep. Orbison shows that obscured sight sharpens the inner ear, composing symphonies from solitude.

In Italy's rolling hills, Andrea Bocelli, blinded at 12 by a football to the face, a cruel ricochet that stole his light, transformed loss into lyricism. The tenor whose voice soared through Time to Say Goodbye and Puccini arias became one of the most famed, filling arenas with tones that pierced the veil between worlds. His twist? A lawyer by training who traded briefs for bel canto, proving that darkness amplifies the dawn. Bocelli's aria echoes the truth: When eyes fail, the voice becomes the beacon, serenading souls across divides.

Far from operatic stages, Freddie Mercury bared his soul in Buckingham Palace's glare, his overbite—a “mouthful of teeth” from childhood buck teeth, hidden behind a Cheshire grin, yet it fueled the feral energy of Queen's performances. Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, he delivered rock's greatest spectacles, Live Aid's “We Will Rock You,” stomping anthems that shook stadiums. His twist? A closeted queer icon in an era of shadows, whose excesses masked a vulnerability that poured into Bohemian Rhapsody's operatic chaos. Freddie's firebrand lesson: Imperfect smiles deliver the boldest roars, turning personal quirks into universal thunder.

Shadows of the Mind | Thinkers Who Rewired the World

The stories delved deeper, into labyrinths of the psyche, where the fifth lesson gleamed: Madness is the forge of genius, tempered by love's steady hand. John Nash, the Princeton prodigy whose schizophrenia wove hallucinations like theorems, birthed the game theory that underpins modern economics, from auctions to arms races. Tormented by delusions of cosmic codes, he scrawled equations on windows, yet his Nobel-winning models reshaped markets. His twist? Saved not by pills alone, but by his wife Alicia's unyielding anchor, who coaxed him back from paranoia’s edge in the 1990s. Nash's equilibrium teaches that fractured minds map the most elegant solutions, balanced by bonds that outlast storms.

Alan Turing, the shy Enigma-cracker of Bletchley Park, coded the Allies' victory in World War II, his Bombe machine devouring Nazi secrets and shortening the war by years. Father of computer science, he dreamed of thinking machines in On Computable Numbers. But his twist—a government's venomous persecution of his homosexuality—drove him to cyanide in 1954, a suicide masked as an apple's bite. Turing's tragedy underscores that innovation saves worlds, yet societies' blind hatred can unmake their saviors; his legacy endures in every algorithm, a defiant code against cruelty.

Frontiers of the Wild | Rebels and Builders Who Tamed Chaos

As twilight deepened, the tales turned to frontiers, of land, sea, and spirit, imparting the sixth lesson: Loss carves rivers through stone, irrigating empires of the heart. George Grey, the 19th-century explorer who lost his infant son to fever on a remote Australian outpost, channeled grief into founding Grey College in South Africa—one of the world's greatest boys' schools, molding leaders from the dust of Bloemfontein. His twist? A colonial governor whose empathy, born of paternal sorrow, bridged divides in a fractured land. Grey reveals that bereavement's void is a vessel for creation, nurturing legacies that outlive blood.

In the cockpits of Formula One, Jody Scheckter, the South African speed demon born in East London, raced like a bat out of hell, clinching the 1979 World Championship with Ferrari's scarlet fury. No limbs lost, but the twist of his origins—a backwater racer in apartheid's shadow—propelled him past giants. Nearby, in rugby's brutal ballet, Gysie Pienaar, Bloemfontein's son, ran the British Lions into the ground during the 1980 tour, his Springbok ferocity a testament to underdog grit. And Hollie Davidson, Scotland's trailblazing Tier 1 rugby referee, a woman whistle in a men's coliseum, commands the pitch with unerring justice, her “impairment” the glass ceiling she shatters. These sportsmen and -women roar that velocity and verdict bow to no birthplace or bias; the field levels all.

Across the waves, Eric Merrifield, the unassuming South African engineer, invented the dolos in the 1960s—a interlocking concrete beast that tamed harbors from Port Elizabeth to global coasts, saving countless lives from rogue seas. His twist? He patented it freely, dying penniless while his creation armored shores worldwide. Merrifield's quiet heroism: Invention's true wealth is in lives preserved, not pockets filled.

Sir Clive Sinclair, the bespectacled Brit whose ZX Spectrum in 1982 taught a generation to code, Mastelek among them, sparked the home computing revolution. No billionaire like Gates, his twist was the pursuit of pocket dreams over profit, from electric vehicles to synths. Sinclair shows that sparking minds outshines hoarding gold; the first “Hello World” echoes eternally.

Forges of Freedom | Prisoners and Presidents Who Never Yielded

The chronicle crested in the fires of conflict, the seventh lesson blazing: Captivity of body frees the captive mind. Winston Churchill, the bulldog of Britain, captured by Boers in 1899, escaped a Pretoria latrine with boyish bravado, penning dispatches that launched his legend. Stuttering through youth, he never surrendered to fascism, his “We shall fight on the beaches” rallying a world against Hitler. His twist? A painter-poet who quaffed champagne amid blitzes, saving democracy with wit sharper than swords. Churchill thunders that escape is an art; from prison walls to global tyranny, defiance redraws maps.

John McCain, hands mangled and broken as a Vietnam POW in the “Hanoi Hilton,” refused early release, emerging in 1973 as a senator and “maverick” who bridged aisles. His twist? A hothead tamed by torture, whose thumb's crook signed bills for POWs and reform. McCain's code: Honor's scars are badges, not burdens; gentlemen officers lead with gnarled grace.

Sailor Malan, the South African ace in the Royal Air Force, downed 27 Luftwaffe planes in WWII, then fought apartheid as a freedom fighter. His twist? A miner's son who penned the “Four Pillars of Freedom,” turning dogfights into democratic doctrine. Malan affirms that skies conquered pave paths to justice.

Sir Laurens van der Post, the silver-tongued author and Japanese POW in Java's hell, survived starvation to pen The Seed and the Sower, tales that captivated princes and peasants. Mastelek called him the best speaker he'd heard, his twist, a mystic who wove Jungian dreams into anti-colonial fire. Van der Post murmurs that words from captivity unlock souls.

In the Boer War's veldt, MT Steyn, Grey College alum and Transvaal president, outspoke his English foes in their own tongue, rallying burghers with oratory Churchill himself admired. His twist? A lawyer turned lion, whose eloquence fueled resistance till defeat's bitter end. Steyn teaches that words are weapons; the conquered tongue conquers hearts.

C.J. Langenhoven, the Cape Town scribe who battled the bottle and loved a Jewish mistress amid prejudice's gales, founded Afrikaans as a language of the people—penning “Die Stem” from tavern haze. His twist? A flawed folk-hero whose vices birthed a tongue for millions. Langenhoven's verse: Imperfect vessels pour the purest streams.

The Eternal Flame | Emperors and Enigmas

The tales culminated in imperial intrigue, the final lesson resounding: Empires fall to twists of trust, but legacies rise eternal. Julius Caesar, epileptic prince of Rome, seized the world in 49 BC, his seizures, once mocked as divine madness, channeling into conquests from Gaul to the Nile. He ruled from steaming baths, entangled in Cleopatra's asp-kissed embrace, birthing a son who would claim pharaoh's throne. His twist? Betrayed by his best mate Brutus on the Ides of March, stabbed 23 times with “Et tu?” on his lips. Caesar's fall etches that power's bath cools in blood; yet epilepsy's spark lit an empire's dawn.

As Mastelek closed the journal, the storm outside ebbed to a drizzle, the hearth's glow mirroring the unbroken chain of heroes. From Homer's blind verses to Caesar's crimson end, each had twisted fate's knife inward, emerging sharper. The lessons wove tight: Embrace your shadows, for they cast the longest light; let love and loss be your draftsmen; and remember, the impaired are not lessened—they are the architects of awe. In that lighthouse, Mastelek smiled, knowing these tales weren't history's dust, but life's living map, guiding all who dared to defy the dark.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

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My fascination with the Boweia Volubilis

I am fascinated with watching the shoots of the Knolklimop (Bowiea Volubilis) grow and climb as high as possible. This make me feel positive but is also a testament to the joy and wonder that plants can inspire. Bowiea volubilis is captivating because of its unique growth habit, those long, green, thread-like inflorescences that emerge from the bulb and climb or sprawl, sometimes reaching 3–4 meters, are like a living performance, a dance. This plant’s ability to “reach for the sky” can feel almost poetic, reflecting resilience and ambition in nature. The enjoyment of this process provides a deep connection to the plants, likely amplified by their familial significance. My oupa gifted the original plant to my mother in 1960 and I now have 200 descendants from that original plant.

My oupa, JT Elliot owned the Botanical Hotel in Pietermaritzburg around the war years. It was during this time he acquired the mother plant from the nearby botanical gardens. In essence each one of my knolkoppe is a vessel for the soul of JT Elliot, that is assisting and riding his legacy into eternity.

This fascination aligns with the romantism in observing nature, like the streams and sunbirds on Oakvilla farm or the waves of life which are themes in my poetry. It’s a celebration of small, intricate moments, much like noticing a “blue sunset” or the “purr of life.” Watching the shoots climb symbolizes growth and continuity, as well as determination. This all ties back to my family’s history and the memories of my oupa and mother. I never knew my oupa as he died when I was one year old. My parents said that my brother saw the ambulance come pick him up and asked if it was the car of Jesus.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Today was a day I have been waiting a long time for.

I came to the realization that my life does have a stark contrast from my peers. I was carefully and delicately reminded that I carry quite a bit more baggage than the average person. For many reasons, many that are inadequate to bring up here, I represent both a large and small percentage of “real” people. I bring a much different background and diversity to my community. Every day, I have to be ready to go out there and defend, educate, and represent people like me. It is exhausting. Absolutely, horrifyingly exhausting.

While today represents many things, I am reminded of what hope, optimism, and empathy can bring to the table. It is hard to be in such a vulnerable position, but I will never back away from the challenges and benefits that I represent. Nothing is ever black and white, I don’t know when people will come to this realization. How could it be so difficult to understand that you can have limitations while protecting human rights? You can have protections while limiting public benefits. There are lots of things that can have equal and fair balances, why does everything have to be an extreme?

Today, I am refilled with a deep layer of hope and optimism that I fear I had lost. I am grateful for all the people who constantly defend democracy. I recognize that it was not my situation alone that resulted in this deep movement, but all the issues that humans care about – democracy, equal rights, environmental protections, healthy economy, and much more – that have resulted in this phenomenon.

I remember reading history books in high school and constantly wondering why I would ever care about any of it, or how it affected me. Now, more than ever, I understand the impact of policy, the magnitude of historic events, civil rights movements, and political balances.

The right words are out of reach as I truly process what is happening around me. It is one of those days that you know 5, 10, maybe 20 years from now will be written and played out into history books. I wish I had a more insightful reflection of this moment, however it is late… and I have to be up early tomorrow. At least, it is a new tomorrow, a more hopeful tomorrow, a tomorrow that promises new opportunities and a more equitable future.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but will return at the end of the month.

En anglais « writer’s block ».

J’ai entendu une remarque intéressante que je partage ici et maintenant pour ne plus l’oublier.

Cette difficulté d’écrire provient de la difficulté à accorder deux choses : ce que l’on veut réellement écrire et ce que l’on imagine que le lecteur veut lire.

En clair, ce « blocage » vient d’un manque d’honnêteté.

Rester à fidèle à soi-même. Peu importe le regard que les autres porteront sur ce que l’on a écrit.

Facile à dire. Pas facile à mettre en pratique.

J’arrive à écrire ici tous les jours en partie parce que je sais que personne ne me lit.

Le jours où ce sera le cas, les choses changeront probablement : quelle valeur j’apporte ? Quelle image je projette ?

Ce carnet n’a que pour seul intérêt le partage de l’expérience empirique que je fais de la vie. Mes sensations, mes émotions, ma manière de percevoir le monde.

Et peut-être qu’un jour cette expérience personnelle raisonnera chez quelqu’un.

Ce n’est pas un souhait aujourd’hui. La seule chose qui compte pour le moment, c’est mon envie égoïste d’écrire. Pour moi et moi seul. Et si un jour ces écrits sont lus.

Tant mieux... ou tant pis.

Democrats are taking the House and the Senate!!! Texas has flipped blue, and Abbott was told to get his hateful ass out! It's about damn time!

I am so happy I could cry. It doesn't mean things are going to be easy. It's still a hell of a fight, but it's a start. It's a start.

The horrific ads that have slammed into my phones and mail for so many weeks now are disgusting. The money poured in to create all of that ugly could have been used to actually help people.

It wasn't a tight win here. I am so, so very happy right now. Abbott and Paxton are bye, bye, bye! I could squeak!

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

A courier working a suburban delivery round does something that no law, contract or app has ever asked her to think about. She walks up to a front door, puts a parcel down, takes a photograph for proof of delivery, and walks away. Then she does it again. Amazon, describing the job in its own words, says its drivers “typically have at least 150 stops and deliver 200 to 300 packages a day.” Each stop is a doorstep, and more and more doorsteps have a lens beside them. Until recently, that lens recorded her. Now, on some doors, it can learn her. It can measure her face, keep the measurement, recognise her the next time she comes, and offer the householder a box in which to type a name.

On 14 October 2026, CNET reported on three proposed class actions that put that change before the American courts: Sigwalt against Amazon, and Fennessy and Trevino against Google. All three allege that the familiar-face features in Ring and Nest video doorbells and cameras create biometric faceprints of people who never agreed to anything. The people they name are delivery workers, neighbours, visitors and passers-by. Their faces, the suits say, are captured, analysed and kept as profiles that the device's owner can label. The companies have already switched the features off in Illinois, where biometric consent law is strictest, and they say the data is protected and, in the framing CNET reported, stays on the device. The day before CNET's report, Apple had announced a range of cameras and a video doorbell for its own Home platform that can recognise familiar faces.

Three lawsuits against two companies, and a third company entering the market, mean the pattern is now set across the industry. That makes it possible to ask the larger questions directly. What happens to the old assumption that you can move along a street without being recorded under your name? Who should have to agree to being recognised at a front door: the person who bought the camera, or the person the camera learns? And what does a neighbourhood become when every entrance can put a name to everyone who comes up the path?

Three Lawsuits Built on One Absence

The three cases share one central fact, and it is an absence. None of the people suing ever bought the product.

Charles Sigwalt, a Virginia resident, filed the first complaint in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington on 1 June 2026. The case is Sigwalt v. Amazon.com, Inc., number 2:26-cv-01887, and it names Amazon and Ring LLC as defendants. It is assigned to Judge Kymberly K. Evanson. The complaint alleges that Ring's Familiar Faces feature scans the faces of guests and passers-by and that the resulting facial recognition data is “not stored locally” but held in Amazon's cloud.

Four weeks later, on 29 June, eight Virginia residents filed Fennessy v. Google LLC in the Northern District of California, case number 5:26-cv-06534. Their complaint says Nest's Familiar Face Detection scans “the face of every person who appears in the camera's field of view” and compares the result against a library of stored profiles. “The feature is activated by the camera's owner,” the complaint continues. “It is not activated by, and cannot be consented to by, the bystander whose face is being scanned.” The plaintiffs say they have never bought a Nest product, never opened a Google Home account and never agreed to any terms of service. They simply walk through neighbourhoods, visit friends and run errands past houses where Nest cameras are visibly installed.

Two days later, Barbara Trevino, a resident of Glendale, California, filed Trevino v. Google LLC, number 5:26-cv-06694. Her claims rest on California law, including intrusion upon seclusion and the state constitution's right to privacy, and court summaries describe her as someone who walks past homes with Nest cameras in her own neighbourhood. A third Google case, Miller v. Google, followed on 17 July. On 4 September 2026, Judge Edward J. Davila consolidated the three Google cases in San Jose as In re Nest Privacy Litigation, under the lead number 5:26-cv-06534. A consolidated amended complaint was due on 19 October, and Google's response is scheduled for 1 December 2026. Google is represented by Cooley LLP.

None of these allegations has been tested, no class has been certified and no court has found either company liable. Even so, the complaints do something useful before any ruling. They describe, in sworn pleadings, how a person experiences these systems from the wrong side of the lens. The Fennessy complaint is frank about the gap. “Plaintiffs cannot identify which devices scanned them or on which occasions with certainty,” it says, “because Google built the system to make that information virtually impossible for Plaintiffs to obtain.” The person being recognised cannot know where they were recognised. The only parties that can find out are the company and, in part, the household that owns the camera.

The Consent Instruction Addressed to the Wrong Person

The companies have not ignored consent. They have addressed it to the wrong person.

Google's own support page for Nest's familiar face detection tells camera owners: “Use familiar face detection in compliance with the law.” It goes on: “Depending on where you live, you might need to get consent to have your camera help identify people visiting your home.” The same page says the feature “is not available on Nest cameras used in Illinois,” describing the restriction as a precaution in response to state legislation. Ring's help page for Familiar Faces makes a similar move. It recommends that owners tell the people they save as Familiar Faces, notes that some laws require explicit consent from visitors before the feature is switched on, and lists the places where the feature is not offered: Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon in the United States, and the province of Quebec in Canada.

Read as a set of instructions, these pages ask a householder to do something that cannot be done. A homeowner can ask a sister or a regular babysitter to agree to being recognised. A homeowner cannot ask the courier who will arrive next Tuesday, who may never come again, who is on a timed route and who has no idea the camera is doing more than recording. The homeowner certainly cannot ask the stranger on the pavement who happens to cut across the drive. The duty to obtain consent has been handed to the one party in the arrangement with no way of carrying it out.

That mismatch was noticed before the lawsuits. In December 2025, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts released Amazon's response to his questions about Ring's face recognition. His office said the answers showed that people wanting their face data removed must approach each device owner individually, “forcing delivery drivers to potentially make separate deletion requests at hundreds or thousands of homes.” Markey's office described delivery drivers, including Amazon's own, as the group facing the greatest threat. The point is about structure as well as privacy. When consent and deletion are left to individual households, the person with the most exposure has the least ability to use either.

What 'On the Device' Does and Does Not Mean

The companies' main reassurance, as CNET summarised it, is that the facial data stays on the device. The companies' own documentation is less uniform than that slogan, and even where it holds, it answers a different question from the one the lawsuits ask.

Start with Ring. Its Familiar Faces help page says that profiles and facial recognition information are encrypted and “stored in the cloud, not on your Ring devices.” The page also says Familiar Faces is not compatible with Ring's end-to-end encryption option. Ring offers a library of up to 50 named profiles and removes unnamed profiles after 30 days without a recognition. The Sigwalt complaint relies on this architecture when it alleges that the data is held on Amazon's cloud rather than locally.

Google's position is more mixed. According to the Fennessy complaint, which quotes Google's documentation, earlier Nest models set up in the Nest app store familiar face data in Google's cloud. Newer models set up in the Google Home app store it in the device's internal memory, but “the cloud is used for clean-up.” The complaint also alleges that Google's documentation does not specify an automatic deletion period for unfamiliar faces. Google has not yet answered these specific allegations in court.

Apple's statement is the most carefully worded. Its 13 October announcement says that “Camera footage is securely processed locally on the customer's own Apple Home hub or in Private Cloud Compute,” and that “No one, not even Apple, can access the data.” Private Cloud Compute is Apple's server system for heavier tasks; introducing it in June 2024, Apple said that “no user data is retained in any form after the response is returned.” Apple's long-standing HomeKit face recognition is described in the same way. A February 2025 explainer from How-To Geek, consistent with Apple's own documentation, says the analysis takes place on the home hub rather than on Apple's servers.

These differences matter, and Apple's design is a real improvement on the question of what the company can see. A face template that never leaves a hub in someone's living room cannot be turned over in bulk from a central server. But keeping the data local answers only one question: who apart from the owner can reach it. It does not change the fact that the stranger's face was measured. It does not change the fact that a household now holds a record of when that stranger came and went. And it does not change the most important feature of all, which is that the owner can attach a name to that record. A named record kept in a neighbour's hallway is still a named record. “On device” describes where the data sits, not whether anyone agreed to its creation.

Apple Walks Into the Same Doorway

Apple's entry changes the debate because Apple sells privacy as part of the product. On 13 October 2026, the company introduced the Apple Home Collection, a set of accessories built with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric and managed through the Apple Home app. Apple said the range includes an LG Video Doorbell Wired starting at $249.95 in the United States, plus LG indoor and outdoor cameras and a floodlight camera. Apple's announcement says the cameras recognise “people, familiar faces, pets, vehicles, and packages.” The doorbell and cameras will be sold in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, with availability beginning in December.

The face recognition behind these products is not new. Apple's Home app has offered it for compatible HomeKit cameras and doorbells for years. Apple's iPhone user guide explains that the feature identifies people from faces in the owner's photo library or from recent visitors captured by the camera. Owners can tap an unidentified person listed under Recent, choose Add Name, and enter the person's name or their relationship to the household. The How-To Geek explainer gives a revealing example of a label an owner might use for a visitor the camera keeps seeing: “The Postman.”

That example captures the issue better than any legal brief. Apple's system is built to stop Apple, LG and Schneider from seeing what the camera sees, and it may well achieve that. But it is also built, quite deliberately, to let a household turn a recurring unknown face into a known one, even if the name is only “The Postman.” The person who delivers the post was never asked. The careful privacy engineering protects the owner's data from the company. It does nothing to protect the courier's face from the owner.

There is also a twist for British readers. Ring's Familiar Faces is offered only in the United States and Canada. Apple's doorbell will go on sale in the UK, where the law treats a camera that looks beyond its owner's boundary very differently.

A Round of 150 Doors

Go back to the courier. The doorbell debate is usually framed around a single visitor at a single door. Her working day is not a single visit. It is a sequence of 150 or more.

Each familiar-face library belongs to a single household. Ring's holds up to 50 named profiles, and Google's is shared across the cameras linked to a single home account. Nothing in the companies' public documentation says that these libraries are pooled into a national index of faces, and the lawsuits do not prove that they are. What the architecture does allow is this. A courier on a fixed round, passing many doors that have face recognition switched on, can end up recorded in many separate household libraries. In each one she may be named, labelled or simply stored as a repeat unknown face, under whatever description that household chose. The Fennessy complaint makes the repetition point about its own plaintiffs. Because they “repeatedly traverse the same routes,” it says, “the same devices would have captured and processed their faces on multiple occasions.” For a courier, repetition is not occasional. It is the job.

The research on delivery work explains why this matters. In October 2022, Data & Society published “At the Digital Doorstep,” a report by Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson based on interviews with 20 delivery drivers and 20 doorbell camera owners across the United States. Most of the drivers worked for Amazon Flex, and most of the owners had Ring cameras. The authors concluded that doorbell cameras, though marketed as tools for home security, “are also near-constant tools of workplace surveillance for delivery workers.” They described householders taking on the role of a manager: using their cameras to monitor, instruct and sometimes discipline the people bringing their parcels. The report also found that drivers of colour spoke more reflectively and at greater length than white drivers about being watched during shifts, and about feeling conspicuous in predominantly white neighbourhoods. One line in the report sums up the courier's position: “The doorstep is both a workplace and a stranger's private property.”

Those findings came from the era of the recording camera. Recognition adds two things recording lacks: memory and a name. A clip of an unknown courier is a moment. A named profile that fires an alert each time she comes back is a running record of her working pattern, kept by a customer she has never met. She cannot see it, correct it or delete it, except by finding the house and asking. As Markey's office pointed out, a deletion right that must be exercised household by household is, for a delivery worker, a right that exists mostly on paper.

Even the law that does exist handles repetition oddly. Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act, the statute both companies avoided by withdrawing, requires written consent before a private entity collects a biometric identifier. In February 2023, in Cothron v. White Castle, the Illinois Supreme Court held that a separate violation accrues with each unconsented scan. On 2 August 2024, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed Senate Bill 2979, which provides that collecting “the same biometric identifier or biometric information from the same person using the same method of collection” is a single violation. The change targeted runaway damages in workplace fingerprint cases, but its arithmetic speaks to the courier too. Under the strongest biometric law in the United States, being scanned at the same door a hundred times is now treated as one wrong. Yet each separate household that recognises her is a separate act of recognition, and no statute yet speaks to what it means to be recognised at a hundred different doors on a single round.

The Presumption of Passing Unremarked

The central question in this story concerns something the law has rarely needed to name: the presumption that ordinary movement goes unremarked.

People are seen in public all the time. What they have historically not been is identified, recorded and remembered by the buildings they pass. The legal scholars Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger gave this condition a name in their 2015 article “Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity,” published in the Washington and Lee Law Review. Obscurity, they argued, is not secrecy. It is the practical difficulty, the transaction cost, of finding or understanding information about someone. A face in a crowd is visible but obscure, because joining it to a name takes effort that almost nobody bothers to make. Hartzog and Selinger proposed that the answer to surveillance often lies in deliberately putting friction back into the process. Familiar-face doorbells do the reverse. They reduce the cost of identification to the tap of a button labelled Add Name.

The urban writer Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, argued that a safe street needs “eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” It is tempting to treat doorbell cameras as the digital version of those eyes. They are not. Jacobs's shopkeepers and residents watched and intervened, but they also forgot. A strange face was tolerated precisely because nobody filed it. A face-recognising doorbell is an eye that does not forget and will, if asked, write a name beside what it saw.

American constitutional law has begun to grapple with this idea, though in cases about government rather than neighbours. In Carpenter v. United States in 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Supreme Court that “A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.” Six years earlier, in United States v. Jones, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a concurring opinion that “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person's public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” These rulings do not apply to private doorbells. The Fourth Amendment restrains the state, not the household next door. But they set out a principle that ordinary people grasp without reading any case law. Being visible at a moment is different from being compiled over time, and being compiled is what changes the relationship between a person and the places they pass through.

The Fennessy complaint tries to turn this intuition into a private-law claim. In its intrusion upon seclusion count, it argues that the plaintiffs' expectation of not being scanned is objectively reasonable because Google gives no notice and because “no social norm puts a passerby on notice that a doorbell is generating a mathematical map of his or her face.” That is the presumption of anonymity in movement, set out as a legal argument. Whether a court accepts it remains an open question.

Who Has to Say Yes

So whose consent should count? There are two candidates, and the products are designed around only one of them.

The owner's consent is real but limited. A household that switches on face recognition has agreed to the company's terms, and that agreement can cover the faces of its own members and of anyone who has actually agreed to be enrolled. It cannot cover the faces of strangers, because a person cannot consent on someone else's behalf to the measurement of that other person's body. The companies' support pages accept this logic when they tell owners that consent may be legally required. Their designs then leave the owner with no means of getting it.

European law answered the question some years ago, in a case involving an ordinary household camera. In December 2014, in Ryneš (Case C-212/13), the Court of Justice of the European Union considered a Czech homeowner whose camera also covered part of the public footpath. The court held that, to the extent such surveillance covers a public space, even partially, it is “directed outwards from the private setting of the person processing the data in that manner.” It therefore falls outside the exemption for purely personal or household activity. The court did not ban such cameras. It accepted that protecting one's property and family can be a legitimate interest. But it made the homeowner a data controller, with obligations to the people the camera captured.

British law has kept that principle. The Information Commissioner's Office tells householders that “If CCTV records beyond your property boundary, data protection law applies and there are rules you must follow.” The guidance expressly covers smart doorbells. It says owners must let people know they are recording, in most cases provide recordings to people who ask, delete footage regularly, and “stop recording a person if they object to being recorded and there's no legitimate reason to continue recording them.” Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, biometric data processed “for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person” is special category data. Special category data can be processed only under narrow conditions, of which explicit consent is the obvious one for a householder. Apple's doorbell will go on sale in a country where the stranger's consent is not a courtesy but, in many circumstances, a legal requirement that the householder must meet. Apple's announcement does not explain how a UK owner is expected to meet it for a passing courier.

The English courts have already shown where the line falls. In Fairhurst v Woodard, decided in Oxford County Court in October 2021, Her Honour Judge Melissa Clarke found that a homeowner's use of his cameras, including a Ring doorbell, breached data protection law, and upheld his neighbour's harassment claim. The detail of the ruling is instructive. The judge accepted that the doorbell's video, which captured the neighbour only incidentally as she walked past, struck an acceptable balance. She found its audio capture, which reached much of the neighbour's property, disproportionate. The principle is proportionality. Incidental capture of a passer-by as part of protecting a home can be justified. A capability that reaches well beyond what that protection requires cannot.

Recognition of strangers falls on the wrong side of that line. Seeing who is at the door protects a home. A named, persistent record of the people who walk past protects nothing further, and costs people who have no say. A design that respected the consent of the person being recognised is easy to describe. Recognition would apply only to faces enrolled with the knowledge and agreement of the person enrolled. Faces that do not match would be discarded immediately rather than kept as unnamed profiles for a month. And owners would not be able to turn an unknown visitor's clip into a named profile without that visitor's agreement. That is no technical moonshot. In Illinois, the companies have simply withheld the feature instead.

The Street as a Directory

The deepest question in the CNET report concerns the future of the neighbourhood itself. What could a street become when every entrance can name everyone who approaches it?

The answer depends on whether the separate household libraries stay separate. Today they mostly do. But the industry has already shown it can link neighbourhood cameras when it wants to. Ring's Search Party feature, launched in 2025, connects outdoor Ring cameras in an area and uses AI to look for a specific lost dog. Reporting by 404 Media and others says it is switched on by default, so owners must opt out if they do not want their cameras to take part. Camera owners are alerted to possible matches and decide whether to share a clip. Ring's founder Jamie Siminoff has insisted, in comments reported by Newsweek, that the feature “is not designed to process human biometrics.” Yet in an internal email to staff in October 2025, obtained by 404 Media, Siminoff wrote: “You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods.” Asked by TechCrunch in March 2026 about features Ring was not currently building, he said: “It's very hard to say we're never going to do something in the future.”

No one has announced a feature that lets a neighbourhood search its doorbells for a named human face. It would be wrong to say one exists. But the parts are now sitting side by side. There are cameras at a great many entrances. Many households have face libraries in which strangers can be named. And there is a proven, opt-out mechanism for coordinating neighbourhood cameras in a search. Whether those parts are ever joined up will be decided by companies, by courts and by legislatures, not by the technology, which already makes it possible.

Even without a network, the social effects are visible. The Data & Society research shows that doorbell cameras already change how outsiders are treated in a neighbourhood, and that the burden falls unevenly. Add the ability to name, and the street starts to behave like a directory. Regulars are known, strangers are flagged, and the difference is recorded at every door. Such a street is not obviously safer, but it does tell people who belongs. The courier, the carer, the canvasser and the new neighbour are all unfamiliar faces until somebody decides to name them. Jacobs's street worked because it could absorb strangers without cataloguing them. A street of naming doorbells keeps a catalogue.

What the Courts Will Not Settle

The lawsuits will take years. The Nest cases are still at the pleadings stage, with Google's response not due until December. Sigwalt has barely begun, and both companies have real arguments to make. Arguments open to them include that the plaintiffs cannot show their faces were ever scanned, and that owners, not manufacturers, decide what the cameras do. Some may succeed. Class actions are a slow way to settle the basic conditions of public life.

But the questions the cases raise will not go away whatever the verdicts. A household device now creates a named record of the people who pass it. The companies have shown, by switching the feature off in Illinois, that they know how to withhold it. They have shown, by telling owners to seek consent, that they know whose consent is missing. And with Apple's launch this week, the industry has shown that the feature is becoming standard, sold as the privacy-respecting version of the same thing. On-device processing, end-to-end encryption and Private Cloud Compute all answer the question of who else can see the data. None of them answers the question the courier is in a position to ask, if anyone ever asked her: why is my face on file at a door I visited for 30 seconds?

The presumption of anonymity in ordinary movement was never written into law because it never needed to be. It was guaranteed by the effort it took to identify a stranger. That effort is disappearing, door by door, through settings that a homeowner can switch on in a minute. The decision about who has to consent to being recognised at a front door is being made right now, in product design and support pages, mostly by default. It should be made deliberately, by people who will one day be the stranger on someone else's path. That includes everyone.

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References

1. CNET. Report on proposed class actions against Amazon and Google over familiar-face recognition in Ring and Nest video doorbells and Apple's entry into the market. 14 October 2026.
2. Sigwalt v. Amazon.com, Inc. and Ring LLC. Class Action Complaint, Case No. 2:26-cv-01887, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, filed 1 June 2026. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.363574/gov.uscourts.wawd.363574.1.0.pdf
3. CourtListener. Docket, “In re: Nest Privacy Litigation,” No. 5:26-cv-06534 (N.D. Cal.), including the Fennessy et al. v. Google LLC Class Action Complaint filed 29 June 2026 (ECF No. 1) and the order consolidating cases signed 4 September 2026; and docket, “Trevino v. Google LLC,” No. 5:26-cv-06694 (N.D. Cal.), including the complaint filed 1 July 2026. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73548337/in-re-nest-privacy-litigation/ Fennessy complaint also available at https://www.classaction.org/media/fennessy-et-al-v-google-llc-complaint.pdf
4. Google Nest Help. “Troubleshoot familiar face detection.” https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9281945?hl=en
5. Ring Help Center. “Familiar Faces.” https://ring.com/support/articles/z3yhg/familiar-faces
6. Office of Senator Edward J. Markey. Press release on Amazon's response regarding Ring facial recognition and delivery drivers. 10 December 2025. https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/just-in-time-for-holiday-deliveries-sen-markeys-probe-exposes-amazons-alarming-privacy-violations-with-facial-recognition-technology-in-ring-doorbell
7. Apple Newsroom. “Introducing Apple Home Collection, a new lineup of smart home accessories.” 13 October 2026. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/introducing-apple-home-collection-a-new-lineup-of-smart-home-accessories/
8. Apple Security Research. “Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud.” 10 June 2024. https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
9. Apple Support. “Use Face Recognition in Home on iPhone.” iPhone User Guide. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-face-recognition-iph04af43727/ios
10. Davidson, Adam. “How to Use HomeKit Secure Video Face Recognition to Know Who's at Your Door.” How-To Geek, 16 February 2025. https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-use-homekit-secure-video-face-recognition-to-know-whos-at-your-door/
11. Amazon. Delivery Service Partner driver diary, About Amazon. https://aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-delivery-service-partner-diary-photos
12. Nguyen, Aiha, and Eve Zelickson. “At the Digital Doorstep.” Data & Society, October 2022. https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/AttheDigitalDoorstepFINAL.pdf
13. Illinois General Assembly. Public Act 103-0769 (Senate Bill 2979), amending the Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14, signed 2 August 2024. https://ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/103/103-0769.htm
14. Davis Wright Tremaine. “Illinois Revises Biometrics Law To Reduce the Prospect of 'Ruinous' Damage Awards.” August 2024, updated April 2026. https://dwt.com/blogs/privacy--security-law-blog/2024/08/illinois-bipa-biometrics-law-amended-for-damages
15. Hartzog, Woodrow, and Evan Selinger. “Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity.” Washington and Lee Law Review 72, no. 3 (2015): 1343. https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol72/iss3/10
16. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.
17. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), decided 22 June 2018. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402
18. United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), Sotomayor, J., concurring. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259
19. Court of Justice of the European Union. František Ryneš v Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů, Case C-212/13, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2428, judgment of 11 December 2014. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62013CJ0212
20. Information Commissioner's Office. “Domestic CCTV systems.” https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/domestic-cctv-systems/
21. UK General Data Protection Regulation, Article 9, “Processing of special categories of personal data.” legislation.gov.uk. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/9
22. Fairhurst v Woodard, Case No. G00MK161, Oxford County Court, judgment of HHJ Melissa Clarke, 12 October 2021. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairhurst-v-Woodard-Judgment-1.pdf
23. Koebler, Jason. “Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs.” 404 Media, 18 February 2026. https://www.404media.co/leaked-email-suggests-ring-plans-to-expand-search-party-surveillance-beyond-dogs/
24. O'Connell, Liz. “Ring responds to concerns ICE could access new tracking feature.” Newsweek, 11 February 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/ring-responds-concerns-ice-could-access-new-tracking-feature-11496717
25. Loizos, Connie. Interview report on Ring founder Jamie Siminoff and privacy concerns. TechCrunch, 8 March 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/08/rings-jamie-siminoff-has-been-trying-to-calm-privacy-fears-since-the-super-bowl-but-his-answers-may-not-help/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

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Chapter 1: The Sentence You Type Before You Pray

The dishes are still in the sink when your phone lights up with a message that makes your face go hot. Someone has taken a small misunderstanding and turned it into an accusation. You can explain what happened. You have the dates, the messages, and every reason to be upset. Your first reply is sharp enough to make the other person feel what you are feeling. You read it once, satisfied that it is accurate, and then sit there with your thumb over Send. The kitchen is quiet, but something inside you is not.

I think this is one of the least discussed costs of kindness: sometimes it asks us to give up the immediate pleasure of making someone else uncomfortable. In my companion video about the emotional price of kindness in an unkind world, I consider why generosity feels so demanding when we are already stretched. Money is only part of the picture. There are evenings when the thing we are asked to give is our restraint, and that can feel much more expensive than reaching into a wallet.

This is closely connected to choosing compassion without pretending you were not hurt, because the choice in front of you is not between being kind and having self-respect. It is between responding from your deepest convictions and letting a painful moment choose your words for you. I know how appealing a perfectly cutting sentence can seem in the imagination. It promises relief. It offers the feeling of having defended yourself. But I wonder how many of those sentences would leave us staring at the ceiling later, wishing we had waited.

Proverbs 15:1 tells us that a gentle answer can turn away wrath. That does not mean a gentle answer will always be welcomed, or that silence is required when someone treats us unfairly. It means the temperature of our reply matters. We can state what is true, correct a false claim, and protect a boundary without making humiliation our goal. That is not weakness. It is choosing not to borrow somebody else's cruelty to make our own point.

Maybe you delete the draft and put your phone facedown. You wash a plate, breathe, and ask God to help you speak plainly rather than punish. Tomorrow you may send a message that says what needs saying, with no apology for facts you did not distort and no insult you will have to carry afterward. The other person might still disagree. You cannot purchase a peaceful outcome by being thoughtful. But you can refuse to spend your integrity on a reply that would have felt good for five minutes. The message can wait. The kind of person you are becoming cannot always be repaired with a second text.

Chapter 2: The Kindness Nobody Sees You Struggling to Give

The coffee had gone cold beside the newspaper when a knock came at the door. It was Saturday morning, and you had been looking forward to having a few hours without anyone needing anything. Your neighbor stood outside holding a letter from the hospital. She wanted to know whether you could help her understand it. You had barely slept the night before, and the thought of another problem made your shoulders tighten. You invited her inside anyway, but part of you wished she had chosen another morning.

I think we need to be able to admit feelings like that without immediately condemning ourselves. There are times when kindness comes naturally, when our hearts are light and we have plenty of patience to spare. Then there are days when we are carrying private worries, and even a reasonable request feels heavier than it should. The difference does not necessarily reveal how much we love people. Sometimes it reveals how tired we have become.

What troubles me is how easily we can begin treating our own exhaustion as a moral failure. We believe that if our faith were stronger, generosity would always feel effortless. We imagine that a truly compassionate person would never hesitate before opening the door. Yet loving someone and feeling tired are not opposites. We can experience both at the same time.

In Mark 10:46–52, Jesus encounters Bartimaeus, a blind man calling out for mercy. When Bartimaeus comes to him, Jesus asks what he wants him to do. I have always appreciated that question. Jesus does not turn the man's need into an opportunity for a speech. He allows him to speak for himself.

There is something we can learn from that simple exchange. Sometimes we assume that helping requires us to take responsibility for an entire situation. Someone mentions a problem, and we immediately begin searching for a complete solution. Before long, we feel overwhelmed by obligations nobody actually asked us to accept.

Your neighbor may only need help understanding a letter. She may need someone to sit beside her while she calls the hospital. Perhaps twenty minutes of your attention would make a frightening morning easier. You do not have to become responsible for every appointment, every decision, or every uncertainty that follows.

That is where I believe generosity becomes healthier. We can ask people what would actually help rather than assuming we must rescue them from everything. We can offer what we genuinely have available and be honest about what we cannot provide.

And afterward, when the door closes and the house becomes quiet again, we can allow ourselves to rest without examining every tired thought as evidence of a deficient heart.

God knows what it costs us to remain gentle when our strength is running low. He also knows that we are human beings who need care, not endless supplies of patience for everyone else.

Chapter 3: Making Room for Someone Else's Good News

The email arrives five minutes before you shut down your computer. The position you interviewed for has gone to someone else. You read the polite words twice, trying to make them mean something less final. Then a coworker appears beside your desk, smiling so widely that you know she has news before she speaks. She has been promoted. She asks if you have a minute because she wants to tell you how it happened. You do, technically. But your own disappointment is so fresh that her happiness feels like one more thing you cannot afford to give.

This is the kind of generosity that never gets called generosity. Nobody is asking for money or a ride. Another person is asking you to share a moment that matters to them, and you're trying to do it while holding something painful of your own. It would be easy to offer a thin congratulations and turn back to the screen. It would also be understandable to need a little time alone. The hard part is being honest about the difference between protecting a tender place in yourself and wanting someone else's joy to become smaller.

Romans 12:15 invites us to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. I love that both belong in the same sentence. God does not ask us to choose a world where only happy people deserve company, or where those who are hurting must stop noticing other people's good news. Life puts these experiences beside each other constantly. A celebration may happen on the very day we receive bad news. It takes a generous heart to make room for another person's moment without pretending ours has suddenly become easy.

Maybe you turn toward your coworker and ask what the new role will involve. You listen for a few minutes. When she leaves, you take your disappointment to the car and let yourself feel it. One honest conversation does not erase the rejection. You can be genuinely pleased for someone and still wish things had gone differently for you.

I don't think kindness should mean disappearing from your own life. God knows the news you received, too. He is not disappointed that you need to sit quietly before going home. The generosity worth keeping is not a polished performance of endless patience or happiness. It is a willingness to remember that other people have hearts as real as yours, even when you are struggling.

And when tomorrow comes, you are allowed to ask for the same tenderness you tried to offer today. There is no price of admission for being loved. We are all learning to give and receive grace while carrying things nobody else can fully see.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index:

https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

October 2026 Update

Haste now the running life leaves all behind, Like washed up husks of dead crabs on the beach Picked clean by the fear of falling behind The pace which never leaves time to be sure Who lost the keys to the back of your mind: “I have forgotten what my mind was for Because I spent too much of it online, And now my attention span is too poor To buy back those important thoughts of mine. Wait, what was the point of this metaphor? Was it just to think of a witty line? My life is too rich to care for the poor.” Such is the state of a mind short on time, Constantly bubbling with slanted rhymes.

— Sonnet 10

We say that time is relative, but time is the real constant. We call it relative because we experience it as relative from our perspective. Sometimes it seems to go fast and sometimes slow. It is really our language for and perception of time that is relative. I can’t really tell you where October went. It is a truism that time passes faster and faster as we get older, and yet the days feel long. I wonder why that is? What natural process in our minds makes the time seem to go faster the older we get? Our childhood exists as a monument which we do not perfectly remember and yet which no one else can define for us.

Writing

I have now crossed 10,000 words (around 40 pages) on The Abolition of Man vs. AI project and there is more that I could add. It is not really a full length book but it is not really an essay anymore. I guess it is a good thing since I have always struggled with output in my creative process. I always found myself having to add words rather than take them away, but I think using Koala Quill has gotten me into the habit more. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think I had a secret pride in this shortcoming of mine. I wasn’t like those other writers who word vomit onto the page — But then it’s all word vomit in one form or another isn’t it?

Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’m still working, and I’m almost ready to start querying my new novel. Fingers crossed!

Music

I did a little recording work on Bezukova, which is turning out alright. The pace was really glacial because even though the song is written, it was hard for me to really nail the sound I wanted with the guitar recordings. I have something I am mostly happy with, though that might change once I go back to listen and add vocals. I also got side tracked working on delay pedal that I finally finished. It’s a productive hobby but definitely a distraction.

I’ve also been falling back into “ricing,” which is a linux term for customizing your desktop and the tools you use everyday. I never thought it would happen again but here we are. To be fair, the tools I found make it a lot easier than it used to be, but it has still been a time waster. But then again, sometimes it is good to have something to waste time on that we only do for ourselves. But then again, again, I would get a lot more out of playing my guitar or reading a book — And it is far too easy to waste too much time. For anyone curious I am trying out the scrolling wm, Niri, along with Dux Material Shell. If we are judging by the time it took to get me up and running it’s the easiest rice I ever did.

Speaking of time, I wrote that sonnet about hurry I mentioned in the last update, which you may have noticed at the top of this post.

Reading

This month I picked up Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut (no relation to the Disney movie) and enjoyed it. It is perhaps not his best work, but I don’t think that’s the point. It was really good reading on my sporadic breaks at work because the structure of the novel itself is sporadic. He really messes with the form, and there are a lot of good quotes. Vonnegut is not for everyone but I really enjoy his zany pessimism which manages to snatch catharsis from the jaws of despair:

“What could be a more negative word than ‘futility’?” he said.

“‘Ignorance’” I said.

I also finished Death’s End by Cixin Liu, both in Chinese and English. This has been a multiyear journey for me, and while I don’t consider myself near native fluency yet, I was able to get about 80% of the reading/context by the end. Some passages I could just read, others were very hard to figure out, but I enjoyed it and it helped my reading level a lot. I plan to keep going, and should work on getting hold of a book soon.

I found the Chinese version of Death’s End randomly from a small online used bookstore. I think I started to read it and then got exhausted by how many words I had to look up, so gave up for a while. Eventually I tried again, and instead of trying to understand 100%, I decided to just write down a few words (roughly 5 new words per day) in my notebook, and then look them up in Pleco the next day. Pleco also has a flashcards feature, so I added them to flashcards and tried to review them every day. It was slow going. I set a tiny goal of one page a day (it’s a 500 page book), but I finished it, and I learned a lot more words. 5 × 300 = 1500, so even if you miss 65 days you are learning roughly 1500 words a year. I would also listen to/read the English afterwords to see how much of it I understood. I found that reading ahead in English killed my motivation to read in Chinese.

Source: https://wordsonrepeat.com/vocabulary-statistics

I think this approach, while “less efficient” than reading on an app where you can look up words instantly, actually led to a greater improvement in my reading level, since I had to think about the characters and try to remember them while reading instead of relying on the technology to do it for me. For my next one I think I want to try Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, which is a classic of Chinese literature. It will probably be hard, but at least there won’t be a bunch of hard scifi words. In the meantime I have a collection of intermediate Spanish episodes from Don Quixote that I want to try. I will try to keep up my flashcards, as well as listen to my favorite Chinese podcast, while I wait to start Red Sorghum. Studying languages is humbling. I think everyone should do it.

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#update #October

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Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack

Haste Now the Slanted Rhymes

Haste now the running life leaves all behind, like washed up husks of dead crabs on the beach picked clean by the fear of falling behind the pace which never leaves time to be sure who lost the keys to the back of your mind: “I have forgotten what my mind was for because I spent too much of it online, and now my attention span is too poor to buy back those important thoughts of mine. Wait, what was the point of this metaphor? Was it just to think of a witty line? My life is too rich to care for the poor.” Such is the state of a mind short on time, constantly bubbling with slanted rhymes.

#poetry #sonnet

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Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

---

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack