Small Influences of Something on the Internet

 I can't tell how much algorithms affect my life. I expect that much of the time, they are operating in the background, and I don't see what they do. I see ads on the Internet, but don't pay much attention to them, so I neither know nor care whether the ads are chosen by algorithms. I did update my subscription to a computer security program, which popped up to tell me the subscription had expired. I recently got a new laptop, which may have had some influence over that. So maybe I am controlled by algorithms written subtly enough that I don't notice the disturbance. Or I do, but think it expected, because I have been using the software for some time, and haven't paid any attention to dates.

But it took me four tries to submit my federal taxes and get the return accepted. I don't type particularly well. Usually, I watch what I do, and read over what I type before I accept it, but when filling out forms online, the process is a little different. I don't use a commercial software system to do my taxes. I use Free Fillable Forms from the IRS. I have to fill in lots of boxes, and sometimes I have trouble finding them because of differences in shading on the forms on screen. But our taxes are pretty simple, at least since Liz quit making costumes. She hasn't had any business in Blackbird Costume Shop for a few years. So we each get a W-2, and I get the maximum deduction for the interest I pay on my student loans, and that's all there is.

I made a couple of mistakes on a W-2. I typed something into a box about a foreign address. It seems odd that the system would take information about a foreign address after confirming my domestic address, but I suppose people could have more than one residence. People who travel. I don't. I have one address, which I had typed in correctly. But somehow I got a few characters in the foreign address boxes.

I think it is a computer editor, or AI system, or something like that, that checks over the forms, and sends rejection notices when there are mistakes. I got an email, sent the day I first submitted my taxes, telling me my return was, um, returned, not accepted, and I should not reply to the email, because no one would check.

I went in, searched the error system to see what the problem was, and then thought I had fixed it by removing the characters from what should have been empty boxes in the W-2. I resubmitted.

I got another email about an incomplete foreign address. I looked again, and found the abbreviation for Ohio, where I live, in a box in the foreign address section. OH as part of a foreign address. I deleted it.

I got another email. This time, it was a rejection of the PIN's I had put in, copied from my notes from last year's taxes. I looked at my records, and I looked at the tax forms. They matched. I have not idea what the problem was. But I deleted both PIN's and put in our Adjusted Gross Income from last year. Same number, two boxes, because we file jointly.

It was accepted. Fourth try.

I have, in the past, made mistakes in typing in numbers while doing taxes. Once, I shifted the income for Liz's W-2 by two decimal places. It took about four years to fix that, because the IRS caught the mistake two years later, but charged us interest and penalties for the two years before the error was caught. And because I copied numbers from the federal tax form into the state and local tax forms, I had to refile for all three for that year, and pay back taxes for all of them. The AI system doesn't catch those kinds of mistakes, at least not very quickly.

I found it odd that I had to put in the EIN for federal, state, and local tax forms, but only the local tax software filled in the company name and address from it. I had to put those in by hand for state and federal. Why does the local tax system have a better database than the IRS or state tax office?

Filing tax forms is an annoying chore. Why can't the AI system check for dumb mistakes while I'm working on them, when it would be very easy to fix? Maybe next year.

A Weakness of the Democratic Republic

 Last March, Governor DeWine of Ohio cancelled the Arnold Festival, costing the economy of Columbus millions of dollars. He went on to order closure of most businesses and schools, and to mandate wearing masks and social distancing, and other actions to reduce the risk of spreading of the coronavirus. He was following the advice of Dr. Amy Acton, the Director of the Department of Health for the state. I was surprised, but pleased, the DeWine would take these steps. He's never seemed very bright to me, and is very conservative, so I expected him to take the mindless path chosen by the former guy in Washington, who made the US response to coronavirus a sad joke, causing suffering throughout the world. DeWine reverted to type later, caving to pressure to open up the state too soon, resulting in two subsequent surges in cases and more deaths, but at least he started right.

We now know that blanket lockdowns are not particularly effective in slowing the spread of the virus, but no one knew that then, so caution was the right choice. Now, in part because some people defied the public health experts, we have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't help. Targeted lockdowns are helpful. Close churches, theaters, and bars, places where people gather, stay close together, and sing or cheer a lot, because those are places where the virus spreads quickly. Wear masks around others, and keep proper distance between people. And once the vaccine is available, get jabbed.

Some people rebel against any restrictions, no matter how important, and people have complained about mask mandates and business closures since they were first imposed last year. Some are insisting that all limitations are unconstitutional and political, and that coronavirus is a hoax created to harm the former guy's campaign. If only.

Now, the state legislature has decided that DeWine, in following the advice of doctors, epidemiologists, and public health experts, failed to protect the "rights" of uninformed assholes, who have made a lot of noise for the last year. So they passed a bill limiting the emergency powers of the governor, the Department of Health, and the local jurisdictions, to impose public health measures for the protection of the population. The legislature has grabbed the power to override those rules. Governor DeWine vetoed the bill, but the legislature has voted to override the veto. Supporters claim they are doing so in the name of asserting the right of the legislative branch to share power equally with the executive.

These state representatives and state senators are uninformed assholes. They are not listening to public health experts, or doctors, or epidemiologists, or anyone with any experience in dealing with public health emergencies. They are playing to their base of arrogant, uninformed assholes, the kind who still say the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, despite the clear evidence they did not. It is shameful of them to pander to the weakminded fools who howl about rights without any understanding, or even consideration, of the realities of disease processes.

When a public health emergency appears, actions much be taken quickly to have much effect. Inserting the legislative branch in making those kinds of decisions will slow the process to meaninglessness, besides the fact that legislators in both houses have repeated shown themselves incapable of judging data and science, and have no record or tradition of seeking proper advice. It is a childish power grab that will be bad for Ohio, and may result in dramatic increases in morbidity and mortality in future emergencies. Or even the current one. After all, the number of new cases is not dropping in Ohio, which probably portends another surge. An avoidable one. And how do we hold them accountable for this travesty?

People say that in a democratic republic, we get the government we deserve. I fear that is true. The people of Ohio are narrow-minded, uninformed, uncurious, biased, and easily fooled, which is why they voted for the former guy twice, chose Mike DeWine over a vastly superior alternative, and maintain Republican supermajorities in the state house and senate. I hope they don't suffer too much from these pathetic mistakes. I hope those of us who know just how bad this could be don't suffer, either.

Covid and RNA Vaccines

 I got my first Covid vaccine yesterday. I have an appointment for the second dose in three weeks. Time will tell whether this turns into an annual ritual. I hope not, but as this coronavirus has spread throughout the world, and variants have appeared over the last year, it is possible that variants will continue to circulate indefinitely.

This vaccine is different. It doesn't contain antigens from the virus, but mRNA strands. Once injected, these RNA strands should be absorbed by cells. The RNA will bind to ribosomes in the cytoplasm of these cells,  and copies of proteins will be made. I don't know how the copies of the protein get out of the cells, where phagocytes can find them, but I'm guessing that is supposed to happen.

Once the cells start releasing the proteins, and the phagocytes start engulfing them, those phagocytes can carry them to my lymph nodes, and search for lymphocytes that have antigen receptors that recognize these proteins as antigens. Once that happens, my adaptive immune response can kick in, and I can start making antibodies and cytotoxic T cells, which would then be available to fight off the virus if I am ever exposed.

Because this process is different, the timing of events, including reaction to the virus, could be quite different from a traditional vaccine. I should take a few hours for protein synthesis to make enough product to change things. Of course, starting with mRNA rather than transcription will shorten that process by quite a bit, as neither the synthesis of the RNA nor the transport of RNA out of the nucleus has to happen. But with a traditional vaccine, the foreign antigens are immediately present, so inflammation starts with injection. With the RNA vaccine, the immediate reaction will be to the needle stick and the pressure of the fluid, but not so much foreign macromolecules. I don't know how the tissue, or phagocytes, will react to extracellular RNA. Since research has clearly shown that extracellular RNA is absorbed, that must not be too strange or rare a phenomenon. There is a mechanism for RNA to be absorbed, so extracellular RNA must already be normal, at least sometimes.

I don't know how long it takes with this vaccine before I have any protection from the virus. Certainly not today. With a traditional vaccine, it take at least a week, and more like ten days before antibodies appear, with a peak in production around fourteen to twenty-one days. Then the immune system is ready for a secondary immune response, which is faster and larger than the primary response. A major part of both is the production of memory cells, both memory B cells and memory T cells, which provide the longer term protection.

As this is the first RNA vaccine in widespread use, I expect there is a lot of research being done to track these effects. This is also a first test for a vaccine for a coronavirus, I think. Coronaviruses seem to provoke rather weak and short-lived immune responses, from what I have read. There are four strains that cause cold-like symptoms, but no immunity, so a person can repeatedly get the same cold from them. The coronavirus responsible for SARS, which had its notorious outbreak back in '02 in China, caused antibody production which lasted about three years, in at least one study. A vaccine for that virus was developed, but never tested in clinical trials, because it wasn't ready until 2016, and no one wanted to pay for the clinical trials by then, because no one had had the virus for over a decade. That was a missed opportunity.

I think, once we more or less get past this pandemic, there should be clinical trials for the SARS virus vaccine. We still have a lot to learn.

Internal Matters

 Deb Haaland has been confirmed as Interior Secretary. She is the first Native American to hold a cabinet position, or maybe the first Native American woman, and the first Native American in charge of the department that oversees Indian Affairs. I read that there are some tribes with oil and natural gas reserves under their control who are hoping Secretary Haaland will make it easier for them to extract those resources. Others expect that she will be hostile to the entire oil and gas industries. Something to watch.

I lost money betting on her confirmation. I didn't pay enough attention to time. The contract said by 1 March, and she wasn't confirmed in time for me to win. Maybe I will spend more time on PredictIt, and try to recoup my losses on other issue. Probably not. I won substantial money betting on Joe Biden to win, first the electoral college, then Georgia. I won more on those than I lost of the contract I lost money on. But I have realized that I have to pay attention to win. If there had been a contract just on whether Deb Haaland would be confirmed or not, I would have bought into that, and won.

The Department of Interior has a lot to deal with. The Federal Government owns a lot of land. Nevada, for example, is mostly not private, but public land, where no one lives. There are people who say all public lands, except National Parks, should be sold off. I disagree. I think we should preserve wilderness as much as possible. I think if grazing of livestock on public lands is allowed, it should be paid for and managed to minimize environmental degradation. My father used to talk about the Sage Brush Rebellion, when ranchers were demanding control of public land used for grazing, until they learned how much it costs to maintain the land, which the government was doing for the ranchers. Those grazing on public lands were essentially being subsidized, and getting a huge bonus compared to those who were grazing their cattle on private land. The government fees were well below market rates, and didn't even cover basic costs. But those Republican ranchers will still fight tooth and nail to keep those benefits, while fighting just as hard for any appearance of benefits to anyone else.

I would like to see increased regulations to protect wilderness areas and other public lands. I would like to see policies put in place to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions and reduce use of fossil fuels. I want clean air and clean water, and some kind of plan to maintain supplies of clean water for the future, as I have also read that some aquifers, especially in the West, are losing water, and have finite reserves. Water is a resource in limited supply, and one we must have. Maybe we should start by closing down cities in deserts. Las Vegas and Reno don't need to exist. There may be others.

Maybe I should write to Secretary Haaland, and propose regulations limiting cities to a size that the local water supplies can support. Put us in harmony with the land. I wonder if that idea would resonate with her heritage.

Who I Am

 I got results from the 23andMe kit. I have most of my ancestry from the British Isles. No Irish, though. Some German. No surprises in any of that. There were a couple of smaller surprises, though. A little West Asian. 0.2% South Sudan.

Yeah, by that old idea of a single drop of blood, I'm Black. Without the DNA results, you'd never know. It's hard to get lighter skin than mine. I do have hazel eyes, so not blue. I'm a nerd, bookish, good at math and science. I don't know what other factors matter. I have no rhythm and am not musical.

I read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She has a character move to America from Nigeria, and once here, she discovers she is Black. She was never Black in Africa. She was Igbo, and knew about all the other tribes, and other people who were immigrants from Asia and other places, including Europe, but in America, she was Black.

When Americans, and other Europeans, created Blackness for slaves, they created whiteness for themselves. I can't say I identify as white, except when I click on menu choices that ask my race. Then they ask my ethnic background, a separate question for me to declare I am no Hispanic or Latino. I speak Spanish, in a formal, school-book kind of way, because I learned most of my Spanish in Paraguay, where most people speak Guarani or some other Native language at home, and use Spanish at work or with strangers. I was a stranger there, and never learned Guaraní.

I don't have a lot of faith in these DNA markers. After all, they are all made from the same four bases, and it is just the order that matters. I don't know how the catalogue of markers has been developed. I don't know how long the markers are, or how much variation there is across the population at specific sites in the human genome. I know interpretation is adjusted over time. Liz became more Swedish between her original test results and the current report.

My brother, John, and I share 53% of our DNA, including the X chromosome, almost entirely according to the map comparing our results. The percentage is about the expected level for brothers, but John has no Asian or African in his results. I wonder if that would change if he logged in again. Or if his has been updated at all since he sent in his sample. I think it would be fun to compare with all my siblings, but I don't see it happening. But at least so far, no one has told me I have to use the other bathroom.

Expanding

 I started watching The Expanse. Liz was interested, so we started the pilot episode. I was not having much success at suspending disbelief, because they had "ordinary" people living in huge complexes in the asteroid belt, people with minimal education and no common sense, and not having them all die quickly, which seems the obvious fate of your average American in space. Plus the idea that in a world run by engineers, scientists, and other professionals, the "belters" were an underclass being exploited by "inners", meaning people living on Earth and Mars. It is a comical absurdity. I turned it off.

A week or so later, after hearing a friend praise the show, I tried again. I learned a little more about the show and the different populations, but I still see the whole thing as a combination of advanced technology and science, and working class jerks picking fights like you see in sitcoms about "average" people, which is still a big gap to cross. The idea is, I guess, that scientists, engineers, and astronauts (who are trained as scientists and engineers, but often with military training and piloting skills thrown in) went out into the belt and built stations which could serve as bases for the work of extracting resources from asteroid and the outer planets. So far, so good. But they had families. And the later generations some how missed out on training and education, and became space bums, as if any community in space could support such people. No wonder the rate of murder by "spacing" is so incredibly high. Incredibly. Unsupportable death rate seems obvious from the first few episodes.

Then it gets worse for a few reasons. One is that the basic premise is that some guy from Earth, who runs a private business that includes making warships that no one in the solar system knows about, except that everyone sort of does, only they haven't made the connection between this huge company that contracts for advanced weaponry and attacks on ships and stations by unidentified warships that neither Earth nor Mars claim, but couldn't have been built in the Belt. But I suppose since no one has any education, maybe that is possible. For a week or so, until every station in the whole Expanse has sprung leaks that no one can plug because they don't know how to do anything except shove people in airlocks and push the activation buttons.

Another is that a secret base has discovered some "protomolecule" that doesn't follow the laws of physics. Its abilities emerge over time in the narrative. But a protomolecule would be something like a pile of atoms that haven't formed any bonds yet. Or subatomic particles that haven't condensed into recognizable matter. The idea seems to be that these protomolecules can enter normal matter, including living things, and change behaviors, becoming sentient somehow, and operate magically, since they don't follow the laws of physics as we know them. That isn't science fiction. It is fantasy.

And then the science goes away. Finding that this protomolecule is taking over dead bodies, with the help of what are presented as very sane scientists who injected live people, and restructuring Eros, an asteroid several times larger than the one that destroyed the dinosaurs and most living things in their time. Fear of the power of the protomolecule inspires an attack on Eros, but the protomolecule moves Eros out of the way. That is remarkable enough, but soon after, the protomolecule starts accelerating Eros toward Earth, and is apparently so fast, Earth has to react immediately or face complete destruction. In the interplanetary chase that follows, a Martian ship run by belters with an Earther captain follows, at about 15 G's, but Eros keeps accelerating even faster. I didn't calculate the energy involved in accelerating a mass that large at that rate, but it would be, well astronomical. And in what seems like minutes, but may be an hour or more in their time, Eros bypasses Earth and crashes into Venus instead.

It takes our probes and exploration vehicles months to get from Earth to Mars, not minutes. The missiles sent to destroy Eros took less than an hour to get past Mars to the asteroid belt. I'm almost tempted to check the distance, and see how far into relativistic speeds these missiles would have to accelerate to cover so much distance.

But I keep watching. I also read Harry Potter books every summer for a few years. Those stories are uneven and have contradictions throughout. I lost track of how many times Harry and his classmates were "introduced" to knowledge about werewolves. And all those references to werewolf cubs, which don't, in fact, exist within the frame of the story, because werewolves are created by other werewolves biting and turning humans. A little consistency would make for a better read. And in sci fi, a little consistency with actual physical reality would make is more about science and speculation of where that could lead than about total fantasy because no one bothered to check to see if the presentation broke fundamental laws of science. Even if you create some fantasy particle that is exempt from every law of physics, especially the laws of conservation, your scientists and their tools should still resemble known reality, or you aren't writing science fiction.

So maybe tonight I'll opt for British mysteries. They may bend a few rules, but, hey, there is a real case of a British copper being arrested and charged with the murder of a woman who disappeared on her way home in London, so the shows have the occasional basis in reality. Their writers have standards.

Not a Smooth System

 The age of eligibility for a Covid vaccine was lowered from 65 to 50 in Ohio as of Thursday, so I began looking for an appointment to get my first jab. There is no centralized website that has all the choices. The state government site has links to places that offer the vaccine, but one must click the link to check on availability, and Thursday, none seemed to be available.

Friday, I clicked on the state site, and saw that a new site was opening, on Ohio State campus, which is convenient, as we live close to campus, so I clicked on that site. I got a list of times for the day that was offered, and chose one. I was sent to a new page, where I put in my personal information, then another page for my medical and insurance information. Then I clicked the Submit button, and was told the time was not available. I returned to the page listing times, and clicked on another, and found when I submitted my request that it was also not available. Although this site was on Ohio State campus, it was through Kroger Pharmacy. I went back to the Kroger Pharmacy site, and clicked for a listing of available sites near my ZIP code area, and the message came up saying there were no times available within 50 miles.

The site would clearly not reserve a time for me just because I clicked on it. I was not afforded opportunity to fill in the required information before seeing if I qualified. No, others were also clicking on the same time, and someone else completed the forms faster than I did. I clicked the main Kroger site for updated every few minutes, and mostly received notice that no times were available

When a new day opened, I clicked a time, and scrolled through the forms as fast as I could, and clicked Submit. I got confirmation of an appointment. I will be getting my first jab in a week, and my second three weeks later.

I still complain about the system. It is decentralized and tedious and awkward. I may have missed chances at other places, though nothing so convenient as the one I got. I wonder how many people get frustrated and give up. I don't know how a better system could be set up, but I wish one could.

My other recent observation of the algorithms was also not very impressive. I read books on my Kindle. I see ads for books, which I understand is part of the deal if you don't pay a premium to avoid the ads. I don't see much that I care to see. I rarely bother to check out the books I see advertised. But today I saw an ad for The Water Dancer. I am currently reading The Water Dancer. The algorithm is trying to sell me a second copy, it seems, as if that is likely to succeed. After all, one point of the technology of the written word is that it can be read more than once. Even if I wanted to read The Water Dancer over and over, I would only have to buy it once. How can an intelligent algorithm not make such a connection? Well, because algorithms don't have independent existence, so they operate according to their programming, which is limited by the information available to the programmer and the algorithm as it adapts, or at least that is how I envision the process.

I still don't see much to fear from the algorithms I'm aware of. It the possibility that the really good ones work in the dark that I wonder about.