America's Got Talent (probably with Flute-Girls)

My grandkids enjoy America's Got Talent.  I doubt they watch it, or in fact anything, on broadcast TV, but they sure like the YouTube videos of some of the acts.  Mostly my wife watches these with them.  I can enjoy them too, as there is considerable skill, energy and creativity on display.  But I have the sort of pesky analytical mind that wonders how many takes for each act, how scripted the apparently spontaneous banter with the judges really is, how many acts an audience is expected to sit through in a day.  That sort of thing.

And when my mind wanders thusly, etymology can never be far away.  So, what does Talent really mean?

It goes all the way back to Greek.  Specifically to Talantan which means "a balance, a pair of scales".  I've dug parts of these at Vindolanda.  Here's an example found at the "sister site" of Magna back in 2023.

You could weigh all sorts of things with these, but with the word at hand we need to concentrate on monetary matters.  A "Talent" in ancient times was a measure of silver.  Specifically, 6000 of a silver coin called drachma.  This is about 57.75 pounds of silver, assuming nobody has fiddled with the content, and would be more money than most people of that era would see in their lifetimes.  A drachma was roughly the equivalent of a Roman denarius, and each were about one day's wages.

Why, I've even found the occasional denarius

The Parable of the Talents.  Most of us remember it.  It appears in both Matthew and Luke, in versions that differ enough to suggest they did not come from the same primary source.  Essentially a Master has to take a long trip.  He gives three servants money.  One gets 10 talents, one gets 5, one gets a single talent.

As you recall, the first two servants invested the money and doubled it.  The more cautions third one buried it in a hole - about the equivalent of keeping it in a checking account - and was severely chastised for his caution.

In the middle ages the meaning of talent morphed from a big pile of money into "a gift given for one's use and improvement", then into the abilities - lets call them talents - that enable a person to make good on such an opportunity.  

I have questions.  Did this bit of metaphorical advice have anything to do with the antagonistic attitude of Christians towards Jews regards lending money for profit?  I mean, it seems like the Big Guy specifically endorses this business model.

I also wondered how much trouble a servant would have been if he hadn't even preserved the principle, but lost it all.  This happened pretty often even before cryptocurrencies came along.  One common avenue for investing was backing a trading expedition.  Ships sink.  Bandits gonna bandit.

And I was surprised to learn than an alternative version of the parable occurs in a fragmentary and apocryphal text called The Gospel of the Hebrews.  In it, one of the servants actually blows the entire sum on "prostitutes and flute-girls".  Now, I'm not sure quite what that second category actually is, but it sounds like something you'd find on America - or perhaps Judea's- got Talent!

A Forgotten Brewery Cave - Remembered.....and Now Sealed.

Leinenkugel's brewery.  No, not the one in Chippewa Falls.  The family had lots of branches.  This establishment was run by Henry Leinenkugel and was on the banks of Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire.

A brief history of the brewery.

Like the Jacob Leinenkugel brewery up in Chippewa Falls, this one started in 1867.  It was actually run by Henry Sr. and his son, Henry Jr.  It got off to a good start, and for a time was the top producing brewery in Eau Claire.  But in 1876 Henry Jr. died, and as his father had by that point retired, the enterprise was taken over by Caroline, wife of the Departed.  Things got difficult.  Their production dropped in half, and their credit ratings were not positive.

A partnership of Frase and Lissack bought the brewery and did their best for a couple of years, but also failed.  The next owners were Carstens and Hartwig, who with additional partners ran the place until it burned down in July of 1885.  It was never rebuilt.

The newpaper article that described the fire mentions that the beer in the underground vaults was preserved.  So lets visit these "vaults".  Or actually, revisit them, as this is one of the brewery caves I have previously shown but not given a location.

While not generally known, the location did attract the usual unwelcome visitors.....

That picture was from a later visit.  The first time I crawled in it looked like a bit more of a cozy hangout for neighbors.

Yes, crawled in.  The entrance had been sealed at least twice in the past.  

Here's what the entrance looked like until recently.

Summer of 2025.

I can actually trace the history of the cave since 1885 in some detail.  I've seen a photo circa 1900 that shows the remnants of what would have been the original entrance.  It was of course a straight run out, so that beer could be hauled out and ice hauled in.  This was about the time period in which the local paper describes it as being a hideout for local delinquents who were stealing things from cabins around the lake.  

In the 20th century it was used for a time by Silver Springs, a company now known for various mustard and horseradish products, but back then they had a larger line of veggies, some of which required cold storage.  The nice cement floors and the remnants of an electrical system must date to this era.

Times more recent have been troubled.  Eau Claire has a significant problem with homelessness.  And brewery caves naturally attract people with nowhere else to be.  Both this cave and "The Cave of the Mad Poetess" have had semi permanent residents in recent years.  There have been issues.  Danger of people being hurt.  I've heard there was a sexual assault.  It's worth noting that this cave is adjacent to a public park/beach.

So the "other" Leinenkugel cave has been sealed off.  Its the right call.  Everything is still down there and now preserved, perhaps for some happy day when history is appreciated more and the troubles of the world are fewer.

After I took the last photo, Hank and I walked past the beach.  It was about 9am and a homeless guy was sleeping on the ground next to the beach house.

A One star review, and a Shot across the Bow.

Ah, Facebook.  There was a time when it was the unquestioned global information exchange.  Also of cat videos which I'm fine with.  I had little use for it until my archaeology friends encouraged me to hop on as a way to stay in touch.  I've stuck with it.  So far.....

I know many people are unhappy with the platform for reasons political.  Me, I'm tolerant of such things.  You provide a service that I find useful, respond to what your customers want, and are not total jerks.....I'll stick around.

But in the last six months Facebook has, as I see it, taken a huge nose dive in quality.

Not across the board.  I still stay in touch with those far flung friends and enjoy seeing their posts of travels, adventures.  And in some cases, cute cats.  But there's all this other "stuff" now.

I'm fine with Sponsored Posts.  FB needs to make money.  I glance at them and move on.  But there are other more intrusive ways FB shoves stuff in front of me.

For a while it was big batches of people (?) they suggested I follow.  Most of them were of no interest to me.  Every professional and semi-professional sport in the US and the UK was suggested.  As well as lots of other junk.  I only really got annoyed when the suggestions got Suggestive.  Scantily clad young ladies who, if followed into a dark alleyway, would at best rob you at knifepoint.

You can get rid of these suggestions by using the established FB system, just hitting the "no thanks" button near the top of such solicitations.  If they come back a second time you can report them for a variety of things.  Selling illegal animals was my favorite.

The Suggestive suggestions are now gone, but something worse lingers on.  Facebook Reels.

No doubt in response to Tiktok, FB launched this a year or two back.  And the subject matter is A) not relevant to me and B) often disgusting.  A majority seem to come from Asia, and I suspect more than a few are AI generated.  You can click on Show me Less of This at the upper right corner of a batch....and the same ones turn up instantly.  You can also click on individual Reels and report them as disgusting, violent, etc.  This seems harsh, but the content is in many cases precisely that.  You get people draining abscesses, both human and veterinary.  You get people collecting huge hauls of small unhappy looking fish from muddy ponds in the Philippines.  You get tattoos and tattoo removal.  You get stuff that - from the teaser photo - falls into the "Don't know, don't wanna know" category.

Reelly now.  We have the equivalent of the Great Library of Alexandria, the Library of Congress and pretty much every classic of stage, screen and page available in a hand held device....and we get this:

Facebook ignores any guidance along the lines of "For the love of Zuckerman, don't show me this".  And there is no official way to nuke the Reels feature entirely.

But there are unofficial ways.  I'm looking at a browser extension that will let me get rid of Reels and other dreck on Facebook.  FB is understandably not happy about this sort of software and the odds are fair that it would in response become poutingly become less functional overall.

So here's the deal.  I'm standing pat until after the spring archaeology jaunt.  After that I'm going to tame Facebook, and if the Algorithms strike back I will ditch it entirely.

For those reading my regular writings (Detritus of Empire) that I cross post here, well, I'm looking at Substack as an alternative.  I'd keep it free of course.  

OK Facebook, that there's your shot across the bow.  I'd like to think its close enough to splash a little water up on the bridge and leave a few muddy, unhappy fish flopping at the feet of Admiral Zuckerberg.

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Ever wonder how much the internet is keeping an eye on you?  We all have our anecdotes.  Here's another.  A few days after composing the above, and while it was still in Draft, Facebook Reels went away.  Coincidence?  Or Admiral Zuckerberg staring at the dead fish all around his bridge and telling his first mate (probably the flatulent little girl shown above) to stand down.....

"Skillsville" Uh, did you think this through PBS?

I don't watch much TV.  Not even much of the streaming variety and almost nothing of the traditional broadcast variety.  So when I peruse the monthly update from Twin Cities Public TV its mostly out of curiosity.  How long can they keep "Call the Midwife" and "All Creatures Great and Small" going.  Clear into the modern era?

But I have a soft spot for their children's programming arm, PBS Kids.  Hey, once long ago my son and I were featured on a TPT show called Dragonfly TV!  Check it out!  Ah, good times.  And did the adventures of a precocious kid and his then cool dad launch any engineering careers?  Maybe.  I mean, yes, I actually know of several.

So I was at first interested then dismayed to read about the latest kids program over there, Skillsville. 

Here's the premise: 

Welcome to “Skillsville,” an animated series that encourages kids ages 4-8 to “power up” the skills they need for future success in careers and everyday life! In each episode, friends Cora, Dev, and Rae solve real life problems by using the strategies they’ve learned in "Skillsville,” a video game where the players get to manage their own virtual city. By trying out various jobs, the gamers help keep the city running smoothly, and when things go wrong, it’s up to the three friends to find a creative solution

What an absolutely horrible concept!  I watched the "Air Traffic Controller" episode.  Three admittedly cute kids, who appear to be left untended and on their computers all day, ask a sort of omniscient AI to put them into a virtual reality to play pilots and controllers.  The immersion is instantaneous and total.  It's way better than their real lives.

And of course they screw up.  A batch of beach balls magically appears and the kid directing the airplanes gets distracted.  Two planes are about to crash!  But then implausibly they stop just short.  The kids pause the game, at least the portion of it that was about to consign cute video Beeples to a fiery death, and cheerfully jump about zapping the balls just like in the games with which modern kids corrode their brains. 

Now, I have nothing against computers generally or even video games.  But they do very little to prepare kids for life.  

Dragonfly TV, which I linked to above, was "Real kids doing real science".  Ideas were created, tools deployed.  Things were built and tested.  By real people.  Things went right.  Or they went wrong.  You learned the consequences.

Given the bleak state of education post Covid, made worse by the intrusion of AI that increasingly "thinks" for people, pushing the idea that kids will prepare for the real world by consequence free actions on a video screen is at best a cheap and lazy concept for a show.  And if the tykes actually buy into it, a further decline in our abilities to do the things humans should be good at.  Using a screw driver.  Actual in person interactions.  And yes, getting the occasional skinned knee from trying something that was really not the best idea.

Can anyone who has never skinned a knee ever evaluate even day to day risks?  I don't want them directing the take off of any airplane I'm on.

FIRST Robotics 2025 - Report Seven

And so we find ourselves between our two competitions.  For reasons unknown - although possibly just to torment the coaches - the kids always insist on going to the earliest possible event.  It does tend to make them work harder early on, but we are not a big enough team to always work the bugs out in just six weeks of work.

2022 - Well, a rebuild year, not much could be done

2023 - Very solid design that almost qualified us for Worlds.  If only we'd know a few things about limiting the current to motors so they don't turn into small, expensive space heaters.

2024 - Many design issues that we mostly fixed by our second event.  

And 2025 - a design that was so very ambitious and came oh so close to meeting its objectives.  In a game of inches, close don't count.  (By the way, none of the kids had every heard the adage about Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, but those are not part of their modern world).

So its another year of heavy duty prototyping and software wizardry.  Honestly, the core group of this team seems to enjoy this process and works right on through Spring Break.

One of the things being worked on is more accurate targeting.  The game involves placing sections of PVC pipe onto these weird purple things:

We have the ability to set the robot's cameras to look for certain combinations of shapes and colors, and to drive to them with precision.  So, why not just "target" upright purple pipes?  First effort: Promising!  Note the green targeting dot inside the red rectangle.

Second attempt: Concerning!

We've all seen that movie.....

punctuation-space-space-capital

I learned something recently.  As part of the robotics team's tournament prep we are doing a reference book to keep in the pit.  It's for judges coming around who want to see what we did and how we did it.  We've done something along these lines in the past, but this year we are making it more comprehensive, better illustrated, and hopefully loaded with material that will get the judgey types intrigued and coming back to learn more.

We are a fairly small team this year, so the student power available to do this is limited.  Actually building the robot takes priority after all.  So part of what I'm doing is interviewing the students working on various aspects of the project, taking notes, and hammering them into something readable.  Hey, you try to get busy kids to sit down at a keyboard.  Now try it with software types...

I'm the humble scribe, it is the students doing all the real work, which includes the photos and layout for the "pit book".  And our layout person asked me something interesting the other day.  "Did you know that you put double spaces between sentences?"

I said yes.....and then asked "Doesn't everyone?"  And the answer is no.  No they do not.  In fact in English class they now are taught to use single spaces.   Huh.  Never a good day unless you learn something.  Of course wanting it to be an even better day, I had to learn more.

Evidently using double spaces this way is a relic of the days of manual typewriters and I think, manual type setting for old style printing presses.  Since about 1950 there has been a trend to prefer the single space format.  So how did I miss this?

Well, I'm sure I heard about the new fangled way at some point.  But when?

Not at Lowell Elementary School.  Good grief, the beginning reader texts there were "Dick, Jane and Sally" books.  I even remember a notoriously inappropriate book involving a young person of color and some tigers.  Modern writing?  Nothing of the sort.  They were still trying to teach us elegant cursive.

So how about middle school?  It was called Junior High back then and I remember it being a modern day Bedlam in which I learned very little.  I did, however, spend a little time in Industrial Ed class setting older than old school metal type for printing.....

I did attend a high school that took academics more seriously.  So why didn't any English teacher raise this point?  I think its because we wrote our assignments by hand.  Ah, but I took typing class.  Yes, surely it would have been mentioned then?  Nope.  The teacher was both old and old school.  I remember her having a beehive hairdo.  I might have been a bit of a teacher's pet, being the only guy in the class.  What I learned there has served me well.  The fingers know what to do, and I can generally think and type simultaneously.*

Although the single spaced mandate has gone out, it seems to be inconsistent.  Plenty of books written in recent years still double space.  And since I'm now paying close attention to this, I note several of my colleagues, who are younger and have less excuse, do also.

While I have to concede that the single space rule is considered modern and correct, I also maintain that it is modern and foolish.  It may be part of why reading comprehension is atrocious these days.  Lets go through what writing structure used to be, and why.

Words.  They give you context.  I say "orangutan" and you start thinking of a big ol' orange monkey.

Sentences. They convey an idea.  Hopefully with clarity. "The orangutan threw a bowling ball at me."

Paragraphs.  This is where the actual story begins.  Ideas linked to other ideas.  "I was seriously hung over that Tuesday morning.  So when I stepped out the door into the blistering Moroccan sun I was unwary.  And it happened again.  The orangutan threw a bowling ball at me."

Each sentence is like flipping over another card.  It shows you something new which relates to what came before and what might come after.  Slurring these together even by a single space damages the timing of the entire sequence.  Think of this next time you hear a young person reading anything aloud.

Ah well.  Maybe it matters not.  What written communication I see in the younger generation is largely electronic.  Most texts are a single sentence.  Or a word.  Or a few letters and an emoji.  To actually care about how written narratives work you'd have to be old and eccentric.

Which I remain, and proudly.

* I'm finding that it is getting easier to simultaneously think of what to write and to type it at the same time.  Either my keyboarding abilities are improving with practice or my brain is slowing down with age.  

FIRST Robotics 2025 Kicks Off!

A bit of a retro experience for me.  After roughly five years of either great luck or iron constitution I finally got Covid.  Nothing worse than a mid level cold and higher level boredom, but I was not able to help out in the week preceding the big game reveal.  Perhaps for the best, I'm handing off the day to day stuff anyway.  

So, what do we get to build this year?  In roughly five weeks?  By the official Kickoff I was back to full strength.  So here's the Reveal:

So it will be once again a "pick and place" game.  We do relatively well at these.  But yikes, it is complex.  This is not the year to attempt a "Swiss Army Bot".  Decisions will be Necessary.

We had a fun day, hosting basically all the other area teams at our HQ.  We had the auditorium and the Big Screen ready.

After a bit of lunch the students were split up into groups.  I rounded up every white board on the premises so each could use one to brainstorm.

This left time for the coaches - technically called Mentors in FIRST - to kick back and chat.  We've been working towards a more cooperative regional group.  What the kids are doing is Not Easy, and in some cases one team may have ideas, supplies or just encouragement that their neighbors might greatly appreciate.  

Our kids think they have it figured out, at least to the extent of what they want to accomplish.  In some ways this is a difficult phase, they want to grab the wrenches and start building.  But we've seen on previous occasions that the initial impression of how the game is played can be deceiving.

More, much more, in the weeks ahead.

Takin' the day off.

 Merry Christmas.  No need for the internet this one day of the year.

A. I. gets all chatty....

I've been tapping the keyboard here for many years.  Mostly of course just me sending thoughts out into the cluttered void that is the internet.  But I do get the occasional message back.  I have a link where people can send an email.  Usually of course it's just spam, but every few weeks somebody with similar interests drops a line.  Sometimes it is to say one of their relatives was involved in some local history topic I cover.  Back when I started deer hunting there was a vigorous discussion on what I should purchase for a rifle.  That sort of thing.

Mostly you can separate the wheat from the chaff with a quick look before either approving for publication or deep sixing it off into the spam folder.  But lately I've started to see far sneakier things.  Below is an example.  In part it is stealthy because the second line is "below the fold".  It sure seems like somebody with a similar interest in medicine, travel and ancient Egypt.....

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"It's interesting how the Waiting Room experience has evolved over time. From my days in the clinic, I remember the efforts to keep things neutral and avoid the clutter of biased pharmaceutical ads. The idea was to provide a calm and distraction-free environment, but even in places as historic as the Egyptian temple of Kom Ombo, where patients awaited healing, there are traces of this waiting culture. It's a reminder of how medical spaces, whether ancient or modern, share a common purpose: to offer healing, albeit with different approaches."

"########## offers a great opportunity, while those looking to optimize space can consider a ############ to make the most of their area."

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I of course have defaced and disabled the link, which was for some sort of office storage cabinets.  Or really, for Osiris only knows what.....

Clearly this and similar offerings are generated by an AI program that can analyze text, connect the dots regards context, and cook up a response that is clear, concise and well reasoned.  I have to study a few more specimens, but I suspect it is even copying some of my writing quirks.  It is synthesizing the perspective of a slightly nostalgic retired physician who was never fond of pharmaceutical company propaganda.  

If that is what AI can do today, what can it do in a few years?  I already know some smart people - OK, they are engineers - who advocate using this technology for business and other formal communications.

I disapprove.  

I've worked pretty hard to become adept at short form communication.  I find it carries over from written to spoken formats, as it is all just a matter of organizing ideas.  I'd like to think that I have a few distinctive touches....to compensate for my haphazard punctuation.  I'm not about to let some damned machine take over for me.

In Star Trek Captain Kirk went up against Artificial Intelligences pretty often.  Usually with a good talkin' to, supplemented with a phaser blast when necessary, they were defeated.

Security Patch?

Cleaning out an old cupboard we recently found an artifact of the great Y2K bogey man.

It's a Y2K Band-Aid!   

Maybe this is what was used to "patch" all the software so that the world didn't end.

Kate Potter's Unlikely Employment Agency

As such things are reckoned I was an early adaptor of The Internet.  So I've got decades of experience with Spam email.  In general it is a low level annoyance, the equivalent of a single mosquito humming around your ear.  You swat it and get on with things.

But occasionally I run across a new species, something that holds my interest long enough to study it.  And I'll be honest here, I'm feeling bad for Kate Potter.  Maybe you've seen things like this:

"Housekeeper Quote - Reply to Griggs Griggs is looking for Housekeepers in Miami, Florida."

Ms. Potter's efforts to book talent and household functionaries are confined to a few small areas in Florida.  They can be generic, such as housekeepers, and weirdly specific.....Magicians.  And they are all on the behalf of people with identical first and last names.  

If you hold the emails up at a safe distance, obviously without opening any links, they purport to be related to something called Bark(dot)com out of London, England.

Kate Potter appears to be an actual social media/communications consultant out of Australia.  She is not happy to have her name and reputation sullied in this fashion.

On the other hand, Griggs G. Griggs (I'm just assuming the middle name) is probably very happy.  Various real estate sites claim the median price for homes sold in the zip code indicated are $12.75 million.  Or 8.5 mill, or 1.195 mill.  Hmmmm, I'm almost starting to become suspicious of economic activity in the Miami, FL area.....

Out of curiosity I decided to keep track for the month of May.  

My tally for the month: 18 emails, 15 housekeeper, 3 magician.   

And who is so fruitlessly seeking this help? Griggs Griggs, G G ,Yvette Yvette, Rita Rita, Vs Vs Emilio Emilio, Janet Janet, Guerline Guerline, Elizabeth Elizabeth and so on.  Each and every one with the odd doubled name.  What are the odds?

And more seriously, what is the point?

Clearly these emails are being machine generated.  It would be the only way to keep churning out this stuff and presumably sending it to millions of potential suckers on a daily basis.  I hope the AI spambots still receive a modicum of input from weaselly humans.  Said weasels have an idea, a concept.  Lets take a job description that is so specific that 99.9% of people will never need it....a Magician.  I've never even considered hiring one.  Oh, add on Housekeepers too.  Locate these hypothetical jobs in a swanky community, and make the potential employers sound totally not fake by botching the names on each of the emails sent out by the millions,  once again,  making them so implausible that 99.99% of people in Miami will not have names anything like that.  Sure....that's the ticket....

To add a final note of weirdness to this saga.....after getting these spam emails every day for a couple of weeks, and sometimes more than once a day, they just stopped.  Did Jose Jose finally step up and hire that Housekeeper?  Or have the AI Spambots just moved on to some other misconception of what will separate the rubes from the rubles?

Magna Dig 2024 - Science n' Stuff

Archaeology has gotten a bit more "scientific" in recent decades.  And the dig at Magna reflects this new focus.

This is Wally, named of course for the nearby Hadrian's Wall.  It is monitoring various aspects of underground chemistry.  Water levels, pH, oxygen levels.  There is a concern that climate change is damaging the anaerobic layers deep under ground.  

The fence is there to keep sheep, especially the new lambs, from getting too frisky around the electronics.

One day we had some University types show up and deploy this equipment:

It looks like something you'd use to shock night crawlers out of the ground.  It actually is some sort of new geophysical imaging gear.  I asked, and was assured that the nightcrawlers are in no way bothered by whatever rays or beams are being sent into the earth.

We do a fair amount of sampling of pits and ditches.  In theory you can figure out what people were doing, what they were eating, what sort of plants were growing on the site in times past.  The samples collected are stirred and sieved.  

Not as exciting as excavating, but when I was assigned to this duty a sudden thunderstorm brought everyone back to the dig HQ looking like drowned rats, so there was that.

Con Men (and women) 2024

There are a few downsides to the advent of spring.  It's an election year and the political nonsense has commenced.  The latest are various online and in the mail "news letters" that combine happy sounding stories - nuns installing solar panels! - with political pitches.

It is of course a con.  And that got me thinking of all the ways the prefix "con" fits our current political environment.  I mean this of course in a bipartisan sense.  I'll listen to anyone's sincerely held, reasoned out political philosophy.  Might not agree with it but will respect it.  OK, let's go:

Conspiracy - the etymology of this one is interesting.  It means to "breathe together".  The implication is of connivers whispering to each other at such close range they are breathing each other's air.  In the age of AI assistance there might be no breathing involved at all....

Connive - This one is curious.  Like everything on this list it comes from Latin, in this case conivere, meaning to wink at in a sort of knowing way.  Somehow the word derives from nicitare, to wink.  This word seems to exist in English only in the sense of nictitating membrane, an extra eyelid seen in a few mammals, but more often birds.....and a lot of reptiles.  Lizard people.  I knew it.

Condescend - A bit obvious when you look at it.  It started out as meaning that a ruler might out of consideration deign to "step down" to the level of his subjects in some small matter.  You know, maybe allow the hunting of squirrels on Royal Lands for one day of Lent or something.  Human nature being what it is - and always has been - it soon acquired the sense of patronizing that it carries today.

Considerate - A derivation of consider, from considerare, "to look closely at, to observe".  This one is rather fun, it literally means star gazing.  Sidereal being a surviving but seldom used word to refer to distant stars.  I don't think there are many astronomers working in political campaigns these days.  But of course astronomy and astrology were once the same thing and there are still plenty of hacks and pollsters trying to read tea leaves and entrails.

Confuse and Confound - two words with similar meanings and etymology.  The basic concept is to take different things, mix them together and fuse them into one mass that makes it impossible to tell what went into it in the first place.  Nuns, solar panels and a Senator's re-election campaign just have not been stirred very well.  Sorta like simplistic recipe concocted by unskilled cooks.

Concocted - I had not known until starting this chain of "cons" that this is from concoctare, meaning to cook.  The sense of it being a process lacking transparency and probably honesty survives in the sense of "cooking the books".

This list could go on and on.  Doing things together - "con" - is a basic human function and thus incorporated into all languages.  One does wonder if the more cynical spin on many of these words is a modern thing or if ever has it been thus.  I can't say with Confidence.  That word of course means "to have a common faith", Fides being the Latin for same.  Such faith has so often been abused by those looking to directly make a buck or to slither into office to do so.  Confidence men.  And Women, this being the 21st century.  Shortened to Con Men because so few remember the Latin substructure of our language as it has become increasingly Contorted to mean any darn thing that is Convenient.

I feel a little left out

I'm going to go out and tempt fate here*.  With the CDC basically saying that Covid-19 is just another respiratory virus I now feel just a little cheated that I never got it. **

I know many people who did.  Their recoveries had an element of nobility to them.  They took on the greatest malady of our times and prevailed.  Sometimes they got to get up on their soap box and gripe about some person they encountered who DID NOT WEAR A MASK!

I just went through life figuring if I got it I got it, and that beyond a certain point all these precautions and masks would prove to be exercises in futility.  And so it has come to pass.

I think most people took this all in stride.  The small percentage of the population that just went nuts over this were probably unreasonable about other things before Covid and will now move on to being unreasonable about other things.

It is a shame that the whole darn thing got politicized, and that the measures to counter the disease were - in retrospect - so draconian.  I've been working with middle and high school students for 25 years and counting, and can tell you that the damage to academic achievement and to their world generally has been profound and malign.

Oh, something will get me eventually.  That's probably the truest thing I or anyone else could ever write.  But it is my intent to just carry on.  I'm not going to do anything that is clearly stupid....no motorcycles in my future  But while I won't live forever I certainly won't live in fear.

________________________

*Fate being duly tempted I did get dismal-ill on the trip to Florida.  Cough, runny nose, fatigue.  Covid?  Who knows, I just slept it off and treated it - per CDC now - as a poorly timed case of the crud.  Fate....it's always Hubris then Nemesis, isn't it?

** Realistically I probably got Covid in early March of 2020, too early to have testing available.  36 hours of scratchy throat and fatigue.  Nothing that rest and beer could not overcome.

An ER Miracle

If you are expecting a heart warming tale of a miraculous recovery from a serious illness, sorry.  That sort of thing is actually pretty common.  Oh, sure, the first few times you see an apparently comatose patient wake up and look around after you give them a dose of Narcan (reverses opioid overdose) or glucose ( 'cause having a blood sugar near zero ain't healthy),  its pretty impressive.  But this story is about something far, far less probable.

It was a night about this time of year.  There is usually a cold, dark, unhopeful stretch right after the holidays.  It was snowing.  And I was the only doctor working a small ER in Northern Wisconsin.

The ambulance brought in a man suffering from severe depression.  This is of the "no hope, suicidal" variety and as such not something that a pep talk and a prescription for anti depressants that will start working next week is in order.  No, this man needed inpatient psych care.

But there was a problem.  He was a VA patient.

Things have gotten better in recent years but for a long time the Veteran's Administration health care system was legendary for its callous, inefficient, slow nature.  Patients could not get in the door, and if they did they could expect to sit on gurneys in the hallways for a very long time.  Probably it started with the attitude that "You GIs are used to waiting in lines and obeying orders, so just keep waiting around and do what we say".  This of course is not being fair to the many VA employees who cared a lot, nor is it unreasonable to note that some segments of their clientele are patients of the most challenging sort.  For a long time, if you had "better" health care options you used them.  Those who did not, had much higher rates of homelessness, mental health and substance issues.

But that's not relevant to our story.  

The patient was a nice guy.  He was trying to do his best in a situation where he had little support.  He was not one of our "regulars", that challenging cohort whose creativity and tenacity in seeking narcotics was as impressive as it was aggravating.

What I'm about to say next will not be believed by anyone who has ever worked in an ER, or who has had extensive contact with the VA healthcare system.  I understand your disbelief.

Within 90 minutes I had spoken to the nearest VA hospital that had inpatient psychiatric services.  It was in Minneapolis, probably three hours away in good weather, longer under current conditions.  I had him approved for admission, the receiving resident briefed on the details, the records faxed and the ambulance putting wheels to slick pavement.

How is this possible?  That would be a longer story.  But it is always important to know who makes the decisions in any system and what motivates them.  It never hurts to be relaxed and pleasant in your conversations....none of which should be delegated to others.  Most inefficient systems are actually staffed by good people, you just have to appeal to that goodness and encourage them to do the little bit of extra work that their protocols don't strictly require.  

I hope the old soldier did OK.  I never saw him back in my ER, so most likely things worked out.  As a victory over bureaucratic inertia this was way up there in the difficulty level.  But I don't gloat over this one as I have on a few other occasions*.  A simple and sincere thank you from the patient, which I duly passed along to the VA, was sufficient reward on a cold, bleak night.                            ---------------------------------------------

Medical Software Gone Wild

Bureucraticus Victrix

Nutritious Drinks on the House

In the interest of not being an Old Grump I'm going to say something positive about the modern world.  Man, we get lots more fun packages.  Makes sense of course.  Its the internet and Amazon and the decline of in person shopping.  See it, click on it, money you never actually touch flies away somewhere else and minions show up to leave things on your porch.

Sometimes they are real surprises.  Hmmm, this one is heavy.  I didn't order anything like that.

Lets peek inside.....

What you see first is a huge stack of coupons for money off of Ensure.  If you are under say, 60, you might not know what that is.  Sold as a nutritional supplement for Weak and Elderly folk its kind of like Energy Drink for Geezers.  And under the layer of paper....

The good folks at Ensure decided to ship me 12 pounds worth of Nutrition shakes.  They do this on an intermittent and seemingly random basis.

Of course it is because I was a primary care physician quite a few years ago.  They hope I'll hand the coupons out to my elderly patients.  Who gets the actual bottles of stuff I'm not sure.  Interesting the things that still turn up 16 years after I left primary care and 7 since I retired from medicine entirely.  

Or is this not random at all?  Does some devious computer program keep track of retired physicians and send them boxes of Geezer Juice every once in a while?

Breaking the You Tube algorithm

I think highly of YouTube.  In fact I consider it one of the more useful elements of the internet.  If I want to learn how to fix an obscure fault in a 3D printer, or find vintage photos of Newcastle England, or dig up a half remembered poem read by JRR Tolkien, well its all there.

My problem with it is the crap it recommends to me.  Gee YT, no thanks.  I'll simply look up the things that interest me.

YouTube of course sees it otherwise.  They are owned by Google.  And they make money by selling information about me to advertisers.  Things I click on.....straight away get put into their database on me.  

The algorithm by which YouTube figures out my interests, and then sells them to hucksters and villains, is complex and secretive.  And as I've mentioned a time or two, about a year ago I set out to break it.

First of course you disable the Watch History function.  I mean, why make it easy for the Tubers?

You then get a scattergun assortment of what YouTube thinks you are or should be interested in.  Some are reasonable guesses.  Food.  Cars.  Disgusting videos of veterinarians draining horse abscesses. What?  Oh, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Now this is the time consuming part.  While doing other things, like listening to a ball game, pull up the YouTube page and just start rejecting things.  There are various functions to do this.  The blanket "Do not recommend this channel" and the more focused ones proclaiming things to be scam, child abuse, disgusting, etc.  Refresh and repeat.

I'll give the algorithm credit.  It tried everything.  Chess, RC cars, Malaysian political news, lots of vampy Tik Tok stuff. 

After a while it made its last stand on assorted music compilations.  These usually run for hours on end and have names like:  Jazzy Coffee, Cozy Rain, Chill Cafe Music etc.  Their niche market looks to be insomniacs.  Or people who are up all night studying.  I hit DNRC without mercy.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of tedious variations on the Coffee, Jazz and Rain to help you sleep themes.  After a bit I suspected YouTube was cheating, sending me channel recommendations after I had ordered it not to.  It took a while but after compiling a list (yes, I should have more important things to do) I caught them at it.  Clear cheating by repeat recommendations of Rain Sounds for Sleeping, Smooth Jazz BGM (that is back ground music btw) Cozy Coffee Shop Jazz and Coffee Relaxing Jazz.

At this point the algorithm was getting desperate, throwing puny, unconvincing recommendations at me like underage half trained cannon fodder.  It was also clearly swiping ideas from the handful of Youtube channels I follow.  Towards the end it was putting up drone videos of historic sites in England.  They had perhaps a dozen views.  Sometimes I was the first person to look at them.  All got rejected.

I almost felt badly for the unfeeling algorithm.  I'd hit refresh repeatedly and it would send me nothing.  There in fact was nothing left, I'd been shuttled into some subroutine where it just gave up.  Eventually it put up this note of abject surrender:

And nothing else.

So I have finally made Youtube into what I wanted it to be all along.  A place I can go to check in on a few channels I follow and to look up whatever specific things I'm interested in.

I sleep fine at night without 12 hour compendiums of Rainy Nights in Tokyo.  And if I ever do need to know how to drain a veterinary abscess I'll know where to study up, even if this is as I suspect just a punitive measure from an algorithm willing to commit small petty atrocities once it knew defeat was inevitable.

93 Million Miles.....

That's how far the earth travels in its orbit around the Sun.  Guess I'm feeling youthful for my age, because even with its occasional tough spots 2022 did not seem as if I were putting more than, oh maybe two or three million on the odometer.

The grandkids grew.  Physically of course but even more impressively grew in sophistication and general smarts.  I am with regret retiring most of my "Naughty Grandpa" schtick.  I can tell when they are humoring me.  First Little League game, first occasion to dance at a wedding and other milestones.  It is no longer possible to fool them by spelling things out, they've cracked that code.

Back to international travel.  A very nice month of archaeology in the UK and a bonus trip to Canada.  

Robotics takes up a fair chunk of time, especially in the winter months.  The 2021/22 season we were in "survival mode" due to assorted challenges.  Mostly but not entirely the tail end of Covid.  For the 2022/23 season we are resurgent with our biggest and I believe best team ever.  

So what's ahead for the new year?

January through March - lots of robot stuff.

April - a reset month but for diversions I'll be giving community ed programs on Roman archaeology, a definitive history of local movie theaters, and what I anticipate being a slightly off color survey of Obelisks around the world.

May - two weeks in the UK.  Alas I could not swing an entire month this year but it looks as if most of the notorious "Anaerobes" group will be there.

June through August - summertime and the livin' should be easy.  A family reunion, on our turf this time.  Baseball games and fishing.

Fall - robotics powers up again.  I've agreed to move our summer Robot School program into the fall after school format.  As FIRST robotics teams in general have to work to find quality recruits we are fortunate to have a Perpetual Motion Recruiting Machine.  Besides, its fun.  Also besides, I'm no longer even borderline capable with the technology of the high school FIRST program! 2023 should be the year I step back and mostly run "the farm system".

I'm planning on trying my hand at bow hunting next deer season.  I will have an opportunity to beachcomb for fossil shark's teeth.  I expect to make it to another birthday - the odds are good, its pretty soon - but despite growing old I intend to continue to resist growing up.

Happy New Year all.

One Man Against the Noise Farms

A while back I did a post on YouTube and the odd recommendations their algorithms were sending me.  Subsequently I did hear from people who had similar experiences but in a departure from my usual policy I decided to not post comments and make their discontents potentially visible to the Google Masters.  But my curiosity was stirred.  Could I actually make You Tube stop sending me nonsensical suggestions?

Now lets be honest.  You Tube is great.  If you want to learn about a specific subject or need to get the basics of an unfamiliar task in front of you it is the place to go.  I like it.  But there is the matter of all the useless dreck that goes along with it.  It's just getting in my way, in fact it is making it harder for YT to live up to its potential.  I also don't like to be told what sorts of things I should find important.  I'll make up my own mind, thanks.

After about three weeks of "interaction" with the algorithms I got to the point where YouTube surrendered and instead of suggesting specific videos they just sent me this:

Now that I consider fair.  It asks me what I wish to view instead of pushing various gaudy trinkets on me.   

After about two weeks it reverted to the status quo antebellum and began recommending things again.  So I started a second campaign.

To get rid of nonsense recommendations you of course must turn off History on your YT account and any linked accounts.   Don't make the bots non-life too easy.  You'll still get suggestions based on Channels you follow but that's fair game.  So I see and will occasionally watch videos relating to robotics and Roman archaeology.  But there are entire universes (and metaverses!) of other interests, and absent guidance from deplorable meat puppets the Silicon Overlords unleash a torrent of things they think you should be interested in. 

These include:  music compilations, 12 hour white noise and/or rain videos to help you sleep, endless "gamer" videos ranging from the infantile Minecraft up to abominable first person shoot fests, stupid people doing stupid things on TikTok, political screeds albeit only from one end of the ideological spectrum and a bunch of really odd stuff.  I got pretty grossed out by some veterinary surgery videos.  I had no idea there were so many bulldozers sitting in a shed for 30 years ready to be fixed up.  I am considerably better versed in the cuisine of Japan and local news reports from, I think, rural Pakistan.

So, how to reduce these?

When a video is suggested you can click on the little line in the right lower corner.  It gives you options:

Not Interested

Don't Recommend Channel

Report

Report further breaks down into categories.  Sexual Content, Violent or Repulsive Content, Hateful or Abusive Content, Harmful or Dangerous Acts, Spam or Misleading, Child Abuse.

These are the tools you have, and each deserves comment.

I read somewhere that Not Interested was the most feared feedback to YouTubers.  But it really does not serve my purposes.  Sometimes YT just sends the same video right back to you.  Sometimes sites have an entire array of similar nonsense and will just send you the next one in line (See Noise Farms below).  I still use it for things that are legitimately not of interest to me but otherwise inoffensive.

The Report function initially took a video off my feed with one click.  Now I have to double click the same report, or two different ones, before it goes away.  This is a new since my initial victory.  I try to be fair.  Making kids enter beauty pageants seems like Child Abuse to me.  And I'm repulsed by many things including execrable grammar.

It would seem that the ultimate weapon would be Don't Recommend Channel.  You click on that and YouTube promises: We won't recommend videos from this channel to you again.

Ah, but do they keep that promise?

For a while I was not sure.  So many Youtube sites just swipe the same music and video clips and if the name of the site is in Urdu I won't be able to read it.  But, alas, after many times hitting refresh and nuking a fresh batch of sites I saw old (non) friends reappear.  A gaudy young lady styling herself Lena Slime has a weird make over channel I've dispatched several times.

Because the YouTube algorithms appear to be cheating I don't think they can be defeated.  Oh you can drive them into a corner now and then, forcing them to send you peculiar videos.  I'm actually worried about a Muslim cleric from Indonesia who always appears with his hands held to his face in distress.

But mostly what you get as a last ditch from YouTube are things like this:

Compilations of hours long videos of harps, rain, white noise, Native American flute music,  bootleg soft rock classics, healing Tibetian gongs, etc.  And they just keep coming.  There are entire sites that crank this stuff out.  I call them Noise Farms.  

They never stop coming.  Their name is Legion.  Endless variations on genres, so many variations on phrases like lofi, Ambience, Chill.  Some variants are religious.  Some are Goth.  Some defy description.

Oh I suppose if I were willing to commit to a grinding Western Front war of attrition I might get them all perhaps at the cost of tendonitis in my mouse clicking finger.  But YouTube has a final card to play.  Intermittently they send me recommendations from YouTube Music.  Slightly less bizarre than Sufi Ambience Chill Vibes for Villains to Study By,  these recommendations only come with one available option:  Not Interested.

I'm pretty sure that whatever subroutine of the Youtube algorithm I've been shunted off into already knows that.  And does not give one digital damn.