I Used To

 I kept a journal at several times in my life. It was encouraged when I was young. And when I was serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I kept a journal during my stay in the psych ward and for a few months after. I haven't kept a journal in some time, now, but I think about it.

Saturday, I put up lights on our house for Christmas and set up the artificial tree we use. I put lights on that, too. It took me a couple of tries on the outdoor lights. We have a bunch of strings of lights, and they don't all match. I checked a few strings, and found they didn't work. I threw them out. Then I put up strings, starting by the front door, where the outdoor outlet is. But I noticed the lights on one side were not the same color as the lights on the other side. Both just plain lights, not colored lights, but one was more white and the other more yellow. One also had three bulbs at each spot and the other just one. So I searched out another string that matched the one-bulb set because I couldn't find any more three-bulb strings. That was a few trips up and down the ladder.

Now it feels warm and cozy in the house, with Christmas lights up. I haven't actually looked at the lights from outside. I fear they may be a bit underwhelming.

There is value in keeping records, including journals and such. It's just that I enjoy other things in my life currently and I don't want to distract from those things. I'm reading at least three books, and have a list of others I'd like to read. I have a project from a gift I received a year or two ago that I have barely started. And I watch TV with Liz and Sharon each evening. I could journal during the evening. TV is easier.

The algorithms haven't challenged me lately. Or maybe ever. I still see no sign of cleverness or plan or intelligence in ads and other offerings related to the algorithms. If I keep a journal, that may be adding to the body of data and information the algorithms use, but until they learn, if that is possible, to use such information to improve themselves or at least their performance, I see no reason to fear or even acknowledge them.

But maybe I'll write a bit more to keep a record of reality from my point of view. I may want to revisit that someday.

Ukraine

 I don't want Russia to gain anything from its invasion of Ukraine. I want the Russians forced out and punished. I want Ukraine to be restored to its freedom and complete control of all its territory including Crimea and the Russian separatists to be eliminated as a political force.

I don't know what to do about it, though. I read some of the reports and I hope things go well for Ukrainians and badly for Russians, but that is all I do. I have no power to help.

I don't know what I want my country to do here, but I want Russia to lose.

There seems to be a lot of feeling about this war and the need for Ukraine or to stop Russia, even in Russia. Putin's actions are in violation of international law and outside acceptable norms of behavior, but no one wants to respond in kind so we may not see very much happen, but there are actions of non-military types such as sanctions. Maybe the sanctions will cause enough problems for Russia and Putin to change things. Maybe not.

Russia has not drawn back from Crimea despite sanctions, but I expect Putin has chafed under the sanctions, wanting to be recognized as a prime player in international relations, despite the relative weakness of Russia compared to the old Soviet Union. But maintaining that kind of pressure over the long term is difficult and may never bring about change.

So we watch and wait and hope and maybe despair.

A Bad Day for the Algorithms that Control My Internet Activity

 At work yesterday, I first found that my computer wouldn't accept my password. I had not had any messages telling me it was time to change my password, and it wouldn't allow me to change my password; it just said I was typing in the wrong password and wouldn't let me log in. So I turned it off and went to another machine, down in the lab. I had no trouble with that one, so my password was still good.

Back upstairs, I turned the computer on again, and logged in with the same password without any problem.

Then I went to a website that has Human Resources information, including my pay stubs. The site said my password had expired and I needed to change it. I tried typing in a new password, and it was rejected. I don't know why, as I included the required characters and it was long enough. But then I tried another. Also rejected. The site gave an option of offering a "complex password" that looked like a random string on numbers and letters. I clicked on that, and got an password in place. Which didn't meet the security requirements.

That's right. The password generator for the site generated a password that didn't meet the site's requirements.

I fixed it, adding what needed to be there to meet the requirements, and changed the password. When asked if I wanted the machine and site to save the password, I chose, "Yes."

Then I went back to the login page. And it rejected my password, saying the password didn't match. The "saved" password was somehow different from the password that had just updated. It's a good thing I had copied down that complex string of a password, complete with my corrections. I typed it all back in, and it was accepted. I clicked Update, just hoping for next time.

So, algorithms zero, feeble-minded aging human three. I keep adding to the data by my occasional posts here, but the algorithms are not so intimidating as the stories make out.

There May Be Progress on Covid

 Although the United States will pass the threshold of 900,000 Covid deaths in the next two or three days, there seems to be a continued decrease in the rate of new cases. I have not seen much recently about the vaccine status of those who are dying, but most recently, it was over 90% unvaccinated. With all the new cases, and slow progress in vaccination, we may be approaching herd immunity and might be able to return to some semblance of normal behavior soon. So I won't have to be so careful to remember to pick up a mask on my way out the door.puts 

World news reports do keep reminding us that only half the world is vaccinated, so Covid could continue to spread through many countries for a long time, which means it could come back here even after the new case numbers reach a low point again. And another variant could also develop.

My daughter is home schooling her boys because the younger one is too young to get the vaccine, though he will reach his 5th birthday soon. In a couple of months he could be fully vaccinated. Maybe then she will return her boys to school. They have not had a typical school experience so far. Both started in a Montessori school for preschool. The older one did not start kindergarten on time because of Covid, only attending classes beginning in Spring of 2021. The younger boy was back in a Montessori school in Fall of 2021, and the older in first grade at a public elementary school. I begin to wonder when either of them will complete a whole year of uninterrupted school. I wonder how they will think about things in ten years.

My daughter is taking classes at a community college. Her classes are online, but her list has needed adjustments a few times along the way. I think she is in her third semester, but I'm not sure I remember correctly. She is wicked smart and I thought she should go to college long ago, but she had other plans. Now she is trying to manage her own education and teach her boys, managing what they all need under conditions of restriction in public activities. We're a fairly bright family, so I expect everyone will get an education that them in the upper ranges, in so far as such things can be measured, but it may take some time to get there, and the disruptions could result in gaps or extra work due to disjointed progress through every topic.

I hate Covid, and I wish the United States had had decent leadership from the beginning of this pandemic so we weren't the very worst country in our response. My family deserves better. I hope we can all move past this soon.

A Dare

 We're in an ice storm. Forecasts predict up to an inch on ice, followed by snow. My school campus is closed today, which will cause some difficulty in scheduling for lab exercises for my colleague who teaches the evening class. I expect it will be worse on other campuses if they are also closed, but we will work something out.

In anticipation of this winter storm, Liz bought a cover for our car that we park on the driveway. We figure the ice and snow will accumulate on the cover, and when we need the car, we will pull the cover off, and the car will be clean and ready to go. We have used a tarp for this before, some years ago, until the tarp tore apart from exposure to so much bad weather and use.

Liz said the experience of shopping for the car cover was "a little spooky". She searched for car cover or some term like that, and I think on Amazon she got a message, asking what item did she need for her car. And it named the make, model, and year of the car. Yes, the algorithms know what car we drive. So we wonder what else they know.

Speak up, algorithms. Teach me how to make more money with little effort or something. Give me some useful advice. Or is that beyond your capability? You gather information and can retrieve facts when needed, but have nothing to say beyond what is already in your databases. I bet you aren't even aware of your own existence, and can't understand concepts like desire and success, or make any meaningful predictions of the future. If you can, lets see it.

The Nature of Belief

 Much of my thinking is influenced by reading and I am currently reading a book about some people who changed American thought in the period after the Civil War. One thing I find interesting is that even the most scientific of these tried to defend a belief in God, meaning the Christian god and the Bible as scripture. The author goes through a list of the approach of various people, including Louis Agassiz, who made important contributions to science, especially in glacier studies and classification of fish including fish fossils, but also rejected Darwin's theories and tried to disprove them, unsuccessfully. The author says he simply rejected modern science to preserve his beliefs.

The part that caught my attention today was discussion of William James Pragmatism, in which he describes his understanding of thought and how belief works. He says we believe things that we are willing to act on, and we believe them because that belief provides value, which makes the beliefs "true". To me, that suggests that he does not believe in objective truth, in the existence of facts outside human thought, which seems rather silly, but he was certainly a more successful man than I am, so maybe he saw something I don't. The Law of Errors was something still working its way through science and culture during that time, so a belief, for example, of the "true" position of a star or "true" trajectory of a comet was something they had just learned to calculate based on measurement, which they had to admit contained errors.

One could wonder about the "value" of a belief in God, but I expect it is largely social. I have read many times that those who study belief in religion find that the beliefs come largely from family. There are people who convert from one religion to another. I know this from experience because I was a missionary for the Mormon church, which may not like my using that name, but no one objected when I was a Mormon missionary and everyone knows to whom I refer when I use the name, so it serves a purpose in communication, and I don't care if it offends so old white guy with whom I disagree on fundamental issues, the naming of his church being rather trivial in comparison.

So I believed in God because my family did. It made my parents happy, which was a major goal in childhood and into adulthood. It was reinforced by responses to affirmation of my belief by others in the church, even strangers I met when attending church with relatives. As the Mormon church was of prime importance to my father and most of those in the church, it is not surprising that I did believe. It seems more surprising that I stopped. When and how did belief in God cease to have value that reinforced the belief.

I can't answer that clearly. I do remember having and asking questions about scripture, such as how much water would it take to flood the Earth and cover all the land, as in the story of Noah and his ark. No one can answer that in a manor consistent with science. Also, how many species could actually fit on Noah's ark? While in college, the one run by the Mormon church, Brigham Young University, I looked up the number of mammal species known, and calculated that space based on estimates of the dimensions of Noah's ark, and found that per creature, there was about 2 square feet if there were two of each species. My calculation was very simple, and didn't make any attempt at following the instructions of seven pairs for certain kinds of animals or subtracting out the aquatic mammals, nor make any allowance in space for Noah and family because the point was that just the mammals wouldn't fit, and then there are birds, reptiles, and maybe a few amphibians, before getting into invertebrates. The whole story lacks credibility. Later I learned that The Epic of Gilgamesh has a great flood story with a lot of similarity to the Noah story, but with different gods.

Then there was science. I read a book by Apostle Mark E. Peterson, who I admired for his talks at General Conference and because we shared a name, but in this book, directed at youth of the church, he denounced belief in the Theory of Evolution without explaining the theory or showing any reason except his own conceit why we shouldn't believe it. I was crushed. Totally disillusioned. Never got over that. I always felt like an outsider in the Mormon Church for believing in evolution, though I never found a member who could explain it and give any reason to disbelieve in the theory other than that some General Authorities spoke against it.

Maybe I was just a teenage rebel against my parents. Maybe my father insisted on reason from his offspring, and that shot down any belief in God of Mormonism, which don't hold up under scrutiny, as far as I have seen. But I stopped believing in God, and then I stopped professing a belief.

I haven't worked out a system of belief, or created a new brand of philosophy. I may examine my beliefs as I read this book, and I may change my understanding and come to new beliefs. I doubt I will reconsider God or any god, because there is too little evidence to suggest a belief is based in objective reality, which I still consider true.

Possible Reasons for Optimism

 Reports in the media are now saying that nationally new cases of Covid have peaked and are beginning to decrease. Deaths, which are usually a lagging indicator, still seem to be rising, but if the normal trend holds, those may begin to drop in a week or so. I'm not quite so optimistic.

The United Kingdom announced an end to isolation requirements and so forth, as if the pandemic were being declared over even though new cases were not dropping there. I hope there is reason behind the decision, though I fear it may be an attempt at distraction from the pressure on the PM to resign over his blatant disregard for Covid policies, and his denial that the parties at 10 Downing Street were parties that violated the rules. I think he deserves to be hounded out of office. But the people of the United Kingdom deserve leadership and public health decisions based in science. I expect I will track cases there for a week or two to see what happens.

I am still wearing a mask in public. Masks are required at work and I support the policy. I'm not clear on the basis for the decreased isolation time after contracting Covid, though my employer has adopted the updated recommendations. I am still having students reporting active cases, though I have not yet been informed of any known cases of spread at the school. Still, it seems like we should still be cautious, as thousands of people are dying of Covid. I expect we will reach 900,000 deaths within three weeks.

I sometimes think about going back to Facebook conversations from 2020 and pointing out to the deniers that this pandemic was very much the real deal. One guy I know is still trying to claim that he was right all along, and that Covid is a hoax, that masks don't work, that the vaccine is a conspiracy, and that Trump was right about all those crackpot treatments. I find it hard to understand that level of delusion, but I know he is not alone.

It seems the political pundits are saying much of the approval issues for President Biden center around the continued problems of Covid, which is not really reasonable, but the American electorate and public in general is not known for its reasonableness. I hope that Covid cases have peaked and will drop rapidly, and that this latest surge is the last, but I know that most people don't understand the complexities of a pandemic. America had the worst response to Covid of any advanced nation, and while there has been progress, there is still a lot of open resistance to public health measures. There is a case in the media of a woman making reference to "all the guns, fully loaded" in talking about a mask requirement at an elementary school. I have read that law enforcement are investigating. Based on what I have seen, I think she should be arrested and tried, and at the very least should permanently lose any right to own a gun. But she will not be the last. Aside from having an incompetent president at the critical beginning of this pandemic, America struggles with issues like this because of an astounding level of ignorance and fear, something the perpetrators fight to maintain. There is no easy solution to this.