Hi my name is Scott Richmond and I’m going to tell you about the different ways that I like to exercise and relax and be outside in the summer months when I have more free time I’d love to go for a midday runs canoe in the lake that we live beside paddleboard hike the mountains fish the rivers when I first started running about three years ago I was doing it because the people that I spent a lot of time with at work we’re all runners and never stop talking about how much they loved to run outside the sun and crazy to me because running just sounds hard and I don’t like doing hard things but ultimately decided that it was probably a good idea to try and make an attempt at this since I wasn’t getting any older I just turned 35 at the time and was starting to think more and more about about my own mortality as I started to gain a base level of fitness from running I noticed that not only did I enjoy the feeling of accomplishing something but that my mental health was reaping the benefits from exercise and being outside it has been abundantly clear that I have underestimated the importance of being outside up until this point paddle boarding is similar in that there is a strong emphasis on being outside so I can’t imagine paddle boarding inside and that it is peaceful and serene I value time alone or I can think and wonder and reflect just as much as I value conversations about ideas and society in the last four years my family and I have really started hiking more and more as we have found that it’s an activity that all of us can do and enjoy we find that whenever the kids start arguing a little more or there’s some kind of tension in the home that getting outside really solves a lot of those problems on its own being in the forest and in the mountains near big bodies of water and taking the focus off of the comforts of modern life helps to put things in perspective during the winter months I still enjoy running outside and this year I’ve taken up Cross country skiing as a way to still get cold water exercise and in addition to being with friends in a Covid friendly manner where I live there is a strong culture of Nordic skiing and so I have had the luxury of coaching every time I’m up there just because people want to help I can see Cross country skiing being an activity that my wife and I do for many years to come as we get older normally I would try to wrap up a speech like this but without planning ahead and organizing my thoughts I don’t really know what to say now other than I’m done
- First off, the MacOS dictation tool doesn’t allow for even the dictation of punctuation. This threw me off right away since I’m used to using Siri and dictation my periods and commas. This kind of run-on sentence is then borderline unreadable.
- A few significant errors that impact the ideas of what I was trying to convey. It interpreted “the sun and” instead of “which sounded”. There are a few moments where the timing of my speech is clearly missing. To be fair, I found myself speaking quite a bit slower than I normally would had I been literally sitting down with a bunch of friends. At the point where I say “I can’t imagine paddle boarding inside” was meant to be a bit of a sarcastic aside, but instead it was just included without any of the nuanced context of the moment. Seems nonsensical to read it back. Something else that bothered me was my inability to correct for errors. I’m the kind of person who won’t finish a sentence if I see a little red squiggly underline. MUST FIX NOW!!
- I guess I should give the MacOS software team (or whatever dictation startup they bought) credit for getting something right: spelling.
- I don’t see any mistakes from the technological perspective; the tool did exactly what it was designed to do. There is certainly a long way to go to effectively capture all the peripheral subtleties of speech beyond the words. This makes me think of literature in a way that I didn’t think about during the readings; that literature can capture the ideas and details, but can miss out all the other things going on during verbal communication. Cadence, tone, pitch, volume, facial expression, etc all have the capacity to alter a story.
- While reading Walter Ong this last week, I felt a strong pull toward a lot of his ideas. To be fair, I think I was experiencing a bit of confirmation bias. His research validated my intuitions on oral and literate societies. As a humanist I believe in the potential of our species to push and progress forward, and to a large degree writing has been foundational to this effort. Records, accuracy, details, permanence, and visual representations will ultimately take humans to Mars. What orality has over writing is the ability to communicate beyond the words. Writing can be beautiful and organized, but it is up to the reader to interpret the intentions of the author unless they are specifically stated. When someone tells a story they can do an almost unlimited number of things to change how the story is told and internalized. I keep coming back to my quiet little aside where I mention out of the side of my mouth that I can’t imagine paddle boarding inside. If I imagine watching or listening to a top comedian do their bit, they have a strong sense of delivery and timing. Hard to imagine that reading that very same bit would be nearly as funny.