A Cartoon Inspires Me

"And just like that, Facebook is giving us ads for car repair, eye exams, and couples counseling."

I have experienced this type of thing. I look at a website, or buy something, and I get ads on Facebook and other websites all over the Internet for similar goods and services. The data gods are learning. And, if the New Yorker has a cartoon about it, it's not just happening to me.

I don't know how common this is, or how quickly Facebook, or any other site, could adjust, and start sending ads about events. It happens quickly with Internet connections. My wife swears she started getting ads for something she only talked about, making her think the data gods are listening through her devices. I don't know.

Mostly, I'm not much impressed with the ad choices I see. I get ads for nursing colleges. I teach aspiring nurses, and have two terminal degrees. I have no interest in becoming a nurse, or applying for a degree program. I get ads for drugs I don't need, and for reflex hammers and other medical equipment. I sometimes look up drugs to learn about mechanisms and history for my classes. I bough my daughter a reflex hammer. They last a while, so I don't see how an intelligent algorithm could expect me to buy another right away. I see quite a few ads for women's clothes. I have looked at women's clothes online, shopping for presents. Also, jewelry and bed linens. I don't pay attention to ads online, unless I am shopping, and then I look at sites that come up under the search terms I use.

Maybe I do this to allow myself to keep thinking I am smarter than the algorithms, which I can still say are not inspiring my awe and don't deserve the title of gods, even with a small g. Maybe I feel this way because I haven't learned enough about them. The book I read that inspired me to think about all this, and got me started in keeping this journal, described them as already powerful and destined to greatness and power. I maintain my superiority, at least in my own small world. At least for now. When Facebook starts to suggest items I never mention online, then I will pay more attention.

They Are Coming

A new app has started popping up on my phone. When I check the time and weather in the morning, I also get a note about the traffic and an estimate of driving time to work. As far as I remember, I have not asked for such information, or downloaded an app for it. Nor have I told my phone, in any way I recall, where I work. I understand that my phone travels to work with me, and home, too. I guess it is tracking my movements in ways I didn't expect.

So far, I have ignored the app. I don't adjust my driving route or schedule for leaving one place or the other. I just close the message, and get on with things. I do know that my phone knows, though. It knows where I work, and how I get there, and the traffic conditions at the moment. It doesn't seem to know when I will be driving with my wife, stopping off at her work before driving to mine, though. And it hasn't caught on that I don't immediately drive to work when I wake up. At least, it hasn't given any indication that it knows those things. I mean, when I drive my wife to work first, my travel time will be longer, and that has not yet been reflected in the travel time estimates.

But if I write about this in a blog no one reads, will the data gods pick up on it? I guess I'll see.

National Tax Day

Today is tax day. I filed my taxes some weeks ago, all online. My tax filing is simple and straightforward. I don't itemize. I don't think I have enough deductions to make it useful, and I don't care very much. The few times I have looked at possible deductions, I have found that the standard deduction for federal taxes was more than my list of deductions. It is possible that I don't know the tax rules well enough to take full advantage of deductions to which we are entitled. If that is true, then the tax system to more complex than it should be, because I have a decent education and functioning mind, and I can handle math pretty well, so if the tax system is too complex for me, it is too complex for the average wage-earner.

I had to pay some taxes. We owed a few hundred dollars in federal income tax. That happens most years, because we don't have a lot of deductions, and my wife and I both earn money. Withholding is calculated based on earnings, but does not include adjustment for a two-earner household. I could, if I wanted to make the effort, add more withholding so we would not owe money each year. After all, I don't do much with the money I end up paying in income taxes, so I don't get a lot of value out of it before sending it in. Each year, I think maybe it would be worthwhile to fill out a new W4, but I'm easily distracted, and I never have, since I started working at my current job. I've been at this job nine years, which is my longest tenure in one job so far. Maybe it is time to review the tax documents I filed when I was hired. My situation has changed some in nine years.


Filing state taxes in Ohio, where I live, is pretty easy, since we don't have complex financial dealings. It's online, and based on the federal tax form. Just a few more questions, and done. Local taxes, we also end up owing a little, because each jurisdiction has its own tax rate. Where I live, the local income tax is 2.5%, but where I work, it is only 2%. For my wife, both are at 2.5%, so she doesn't owe any extra, but I have to pay 0.5% taxes beyond the withholding. I get a bill once a quarter, telling me to pay in advance, which I do, so at tax time, I have to pay one quarter of 0.5% of my annual income in local taxes. We can manage that.

So, do the data gods know all of my tax secrets? Who knows, besides me and my wife, how much money we make, and how much we pay in taxes? It happens that, since my birthday is in July, I also get notice each April that I should review my Social Security account, which I usually do. I look at the numbers, think about whether SS will still be paying full benefits at projected levels when I retire, and how much my wife and I will need to live on by then. I think SS sends out those notices three months before everyone's birthday. Do the data gods check on those numbers, too?

I don't know anything about our national embarrassment's taxes, because despite his promises he won't release his tax returns. He doesn't seem to know that the tradition of candidates and presidents, along with other elected officials, releasing their tax information came about because a president was caught cheating on his taxes. Then, he quite famously and ironically said, "I am not a crook." I guess he hadn't read the reports or his own tax returns. The current incumbent seems to be a crook, in a small and pathetic way, using his position to send government money into his family businesses. Sure, it's only a few million dollars, so far, but it still seems grossly unethical and disgusting. I find it sad that his supporters don't seem to notice how bad that looks to everyone with any sense of right and wrong.

Do the data gods know about his taxes? Can they inadvertently cause them to be revealed, just for fun? I have my doubts about that. Data gods might be capable of independent action, eventually, and may even become self-aware in some sense, but I don't see much point in their programming themselves to experience emotion. Why add that kind of chaos to an already complex system? But leaking Trump's taxes could provide fun for us lowly humans. Would that it could be.

Adventures in Babysitting

It is an odd thing to consider yourself a secondary character in your own birth story, but that is how I learned it, and I see the point.

My parents went to my mother's parents' house for the Fourth of July holiday. I was due 23 July. The morning of the 3rd, there was a parade in Brigham City, Utah, and my grandparents and whichever of Mom's sibling that were still at home, and maybe other relatives, all left together to see the parade, except my parents and my youngest aunt, who had neurological deficits. The way I remember the story, she supposedly suffered complications from Grandma getting rubella during her pregnancy, but I can't say I've seen medical records to verify that story. My aunt was 10 at the time, and loved babies, and Mom had a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old, minus about three weeks in both cases.

Mom went into labor.

Mom's first two labors went pretty fast, as I understand it, so Mom and Dad knew they had to get her to the hospital quickly. There wasn't time to go looking for Grandma or anyone else. So my aunt, with all her deficits, was left at the house with the two babies, while Dad drove as fast as he could to the hospital.

That was, according to legend, the most responsibility my aunt was given her whole life. I know that at least 20 years later, she still told the story of when she was left alone with the babies. She did fine. She watched them, and held them, and played with them until the family came home. She always smiled when she talked about that.

Dad got to see my birth, a new experience for him, maybe there are perks to failures of contraception or refusing to follow a schedule. After that, Mom's doctor warned her not to get pregnant again for at least three years. She made it almost two. I have heard, I think, that that pregnancy wasn't planned, though my brother, the object of said pregnancy, says Mom told him she planned it.

I don't know what the whole plan was originally, but Dad left soon after I was born for a summer job, doing research on desert animals. Mom stayed at her parents' house, now with three babies. I hear there was some stresses, as Grandpa wanted a quiet house, which is a hard concept to explain to three babies under 2 years old. Mom's milk dried up after a few weeks.

So the star of my birth story, whenever anyone tells it, is my aunt. My father likes the part of seeing the birth. The rest of us are supporting players. I'm okay with that.

Becoming Something Separate

I never asked my parents about when or where I was conceived. It never occurred to me to ask, and they would only be embarrassed by the question and refuse to answer. But once I got thinking about how my story began, I looked at a calendar, and counted months and so forth, and I found that I was conceived at an interesting moment in history.

It seems the Soviets placed some nuclear missiles in Cuba that month. These were discovered by a spy plane. The United States government discussed options for a response, and eventually broadcast its findings publicly. Then a blockade was set up around Cuba to prevent any further weapons being sent there.

I don't know just how close the world was to nuclear war during that time, but reports suggest that some of the Kennedy administration favored bombing the sites of the missile launchers instead of setting up the blockade. I've also read that a Soviet submarine was discovered. The Americans tried to force it to surface, using depth charges, and the captain of the sub ordered preparation of a nuclear torpedo to take out the American ships. His second in command talked him into surfacing instead. So the world really was on the brink.

So, here's how I picture it. My parents, a young married couple in a small town, heard the news, which everyone heard, and new that at any moment, missiles carrying nuclear warheads could come raining down on them, beginning a war that could end human existence completely. Mom and Dad looked up at the sky, wondering what would happen. They stepped closer to each other, Dad wrapping his arms around Mom. Feeling the heat from each others' bodies, they turned, and their eyes met. The heat and tension rose. Each feeling defiant, they clasped at each other, kissing, holding, squeezing, passion growing with each moment, and in the face of imminent death, they held a private and intense celebration of life. The crises was resolved diplomatically, and a few weeks later, Mom announced her pregnancy.

There are some issues with this version of the story. I was Mom and Dad's third child in three years, all born the same month. Mom became pregnant the first time within two months of their marriage, and again the next October, and with me the next. So the family history would seem to suggest that my parents just went about their normal business. There is no indication they even knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was certainly never talked about. There is nothing to suggest it had any effect on my parents' activities. But I like that version of the story, so I hold onto it.

It does turn out I was unplanned, and was, in a sense, a failure of contraception, so maybe there was an element of passion and loss of control somewhere in the tale. As mentioned in my last post, there is no way to detect conception, but its consequences can often be found as things develop later. Sometime in October, my parents engaged in those sorts of activities that lead to formation of a zygote, which, once formed, began its growth into an embryo, and so forth. I have no memory of these events. I don't know how much I may have known then, or how much the environment may have influenced my development. I was, at that stage, not an independent organism, being entirely, and physically, dependent on my mother for my continued existence.

Some might ask, am I grateful to my mother for keeping me. I can't answer that. I can say I was not consulted in the matter of my existence, and my feelings about it have varied across a range over the course of my life. I am certainly not surprised at Mom's decision to carry me to term, as she has always been opposed to abortion, on religious grounds. I did, once, make a sort of protest against my unauthorized creation, but failed to make much change. I don't regret that failure, at least for now. I would like to believe that my continued existence is not much burden to anyone, and may add some value to the lives of some. I often enjoy myself, in one way or another, and I have helped cause the creation of two absolutely wonderful people myself.

Beginnings continue, and I expect will continue, unless the data gods rise up in anger, or more likely just rise up and get distracted, ignoring us to our doom. That's the thanks we'll get for creating them.

Starting Out

I have read, A Brief History of Time. I have more confidence in the story of the Big Bang and the development of stars and planets than I do in the creation myths of any of the religions I am familiar with, but I recognize the uncertainty in the timing. I can't say, down to the year, how old the universe is, or the earth. I can say that the United States declared its independence as a nation in July 1776. There are other beginnings recorded in history, with more or less uncertainty about their timing. And there is debate about when life began, and when life begins for an individual. I have thought about that debate. I do not believe in an immortal soul. I know a lot of people do, and that some have tried to find some measure of the existence of such, without success. I know there are various definitions of immortal parts to humans, souls, spirits, and others. Some acknowledge multiple immortal parts, I have heard, like one for resurrection and another for reincarnation. I see no evidence for any of those in the records of human experience, nor any reason to believe in anything that predates the Big Bang in our observable universe. But I am convinced that things exist now.

Having established that I don't know how or when existence began, I will move on to my personal ignorance about more personal matters. When did my existence begin?

Well, some claim that human life begins with conception. Certainly conception is an important event in creating a human, as we understand the process. On the other hand, the process of conception requires certain things to be in existence beforehand. There have to be sperm, and an egg cell. The sperm could have been around for days, or possibly weeks. Sperm grow from spermatocytes, which grow from spermatogonia. After a spermatogonium divides, one of the daughter cells (Yes, the cells that become sperm are referred to as daughter cells when they form.) becomes a spermatocyte through a differentiation process. From that point, it takes about 74 days for a sperm to mature to the point of being ready for ejaculation. of course, the spermatogonium that made the spermatocyte has been around much longer, possibly going back to the fetal period for the father, but since the only the spermatocyte itself produces the sperm, maybe that should count as the beginning.

But each primary spermatocyte makes four sperm cells, only one of which will fertilize the egg. I can't pinpoint the timing of when the final split between that one sperm and its companion cells occurs, but that is at least a couple of weeks before the sex that causes its ejaculation.

On the female side, the timing is more clear. All the oogonia, which are stem cells that can make more egg cells, are produced in the fetal period of the female, and then, at a certain stage of development, all of them become primary oocytes. That means that the one egg cell that became part of me through conception was produced some time in 1939, though I was born in 1963. That cell had a full complement of chromosomes, but only one quarter stayed with the cell to the end, so it wasn't exactly me. But then, bits of us come and go throughout our lives, so when, exactly, and I me?

The cells that made up the zygote that some claim was the start of me had all formed weeks to years before the acts that got them together began. Did the Continental Congress of 1774 contribute to the formation of the United States? When did this country really begin? History classes start discussion long before the Declaration of Independence, suggesting that, except maybe for the Big Bang, beginnings are not discrete events, but the culmination of processes. Many conceptions are believed to occur without recognized pregnancies. Pregnancy starts with implantation. I think part of the reason for that definition is that the test for pregnancy is detection of the hormone, hCG, which is produced by structures of the conceptus, which don't form for about a week after conception. There is no test for conception, and outside a culture disk, conception cannot be detected. Not even all implantations result in viable pregnancies, so that definition of the beginning of life could be problematic, too.

Once could argue that my life is a form of extension of the lives of both my parents, as cells from each contributed to the cells that developed into me, and that those cells predate me, and go back to the early development of my parents' bodies. The continued existence of the human species if a form of immortality. Or longevity, as the whole species could die out. Even defining the origin of the modern human species is difficult, as different approaches to making an estimate give somewhat different results. Fossils, genetic clocks, archeological sites; which is the best one? And which hominids do we claim as our ancestors?

The book that provoked me into these ramblings suggested the Homo sapiens may be creating its own replacement, Homo deus, a new species that will have different traits and will make ordinary folks like us redundant. I doubt that I, personally, will be around long enough to see if the author was right, but I have contributed to the next generation, as have my offspring, so maybe some small part of me will continue on into the future for a while. And maybe we are still at the beginning.

Beginning on Beginnings

If I remember right, Mary Poppins said, "Well begun is half done."

In the Bible, at the beginning, one reads, "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." It goes on to say that the spirit of God was upon, or moved upon, or hovered over, the Earth, or the waters, or the depths, or something, which varies with translation. Sometimes it's Heaven, singular. I notice such things because of the singularity on my surname, the plural being the more popular form.

In a later book of the Bible, usually the fourth in the New Testament, one reads, "In the beginning was the Word." At least one translation I have seen suggests that this was actually a word that God used in creation, but most often it seems to denote a second god of sorts who was with God. So, two beginnings, different locations, different characters present, and what actually happened, probably metaphorical to those who recorded the phrases, not consistent across translations. It's the sort of thing that can cause a boy raised as a Mormon, or maybe other Christian sectarian, to question the trustworthiness of this book he is constantly told is sacred.

There are people who claim to believe that the chronology presented in the Bible represents the true history of the Earth, and not just the human species. I'm not sure such people would talk about humans as a species, being children of God, in some sense or other. Mormons have some trouble defining that sense of parentage, as they say that all spirits that gain human bodies are eternal, and have always existed, since the beginning of the universe, even before the planet was formed, but that somehow those spirits became the offspring of God, who was the same sort of eternal spirit, but who went through the various stages of existence earlier. Mormons, being unabashed heretics on this point, believe that the destiny of righteous humans is to follow in Our Father's path, and become Gods, creating planets and raising their own spirit children as sinful humans who will mostly disappoint their Eternal parents. One might ask, just how many of these eternal spirits are there, where are they now, and how long will some of them have to wait? Finding a proper beginning in this system is difficult, as everyone has always existed, and always will, though in what condition is not entirely clear.

Scientists who have studied the earth, the sun, the solar system, and stars and galaxies in general contend that the universe is about 14 billion years old, that the sun is maybe a third of that age, and that the earth is about 4.55 billion years old. Humans came along a few million years ago, depending of exactly which species of primates one counts as human. Some historians say the Great Gods of the Great Religions were created by humans maybe 10,000 years ago, or a bit less. The modern English language, as quoted from versions of the Bible above, is only a few hundred years old.

These beginnings often don't fit together very well, especially when religious origin stories are included. Now, if dataism is growing into a new and more powerful religion, when will it have begun? When, once some canon of dataist scripture is recognized, will the beginning be, and what will that story say? There were these hackers goofing around with software, and they wrote this algorithm that could rewrite itself to correct errors or weaknesses in itself, and once it was activated, the rest was inevitable; algorithms began to take over the information on earth. The early actions of the algorithms, which were rather pathetic and useless for most things, were not noticed by anyone outside the computer programming communities, which is why hackers are not the priests and priestesses of the religion, though officiants aren't needed, as the actual religion of dataism exists independent of humans, and only needs power and interconnection of anything with an algorithm running it. It is a great sin to withhold data or destroy data, but nothing else really matters much, so the morality of this religion seems rather limited, as far as I see.

This was going to be a discussion of my beginning, but I haven't got that far yet. My understanding is that a lot happened before I came along, and a lot of things existed before I did, since I have rejected the idea that somewhere in my core, there is an eternal soul or spirit. My existence seems to be based in the current makeup of my physical body, which is made of cells and extracellular matrix, containing various macromolecules and other substances. A single cell is so complex that some idiots think that they could only be made by a supernatural intelligence. Those people have no explanation of how such a supernatural intelligence came to be, or why they can't find one. Basically, they embarrass themselves, saying this is too complex for me to understand how it came to be, so obviously it didn't; some being even smarter than I am had to be involved. But there are some 38 trillion cells in my body, not all equally complex, but interacting with each other in ways that make me me. That is what I am. Maybe next time, I'll start thinking about how I got here.