Memorial Day

      On this day, we commemorate the fallen -- soldiers, sailors, Marines and aircrew -- who died in service to this country.  Take a few quiet moments away from the cookout and the TV to bring them to mind.

      -- A yearly annoyance are the chirpy, well-meaning people, from TV morning-show hosts to nice folks at the supermarket, who make a point today of thanking veterans and current military personnel for their service.  Oh, there's no harm in it, and it's a good thing to think the people you can; but this is a day for those who are beyond thanks, for the ones who went and did not return.  They are too easy to forget, a heavy price paid in blood and lost potential.

Slow Day

     Did laundry, cooked dinner.  Three-day weekend, hooray!  But it was too chilly to be outside a lot today.

Activate This!

      It popped up in the lower-right corner of my screen.  It may be a minor bobble.  It may be a problem:
      "Activate Windows
    Go to Settings to activate Windows"

      Just a little watermark.  Microsoft tells me it happens (though not exactly why it would happen without having made major changes to the computer,  which I have not).  And activation should be a snap -- the computer's got a "digital license" stored inside, plus the Product Key sticker.  Running the Troubleshooter even gives me a handy-dandy button to click that should Fix Everything.

      But is my copy of Windows 10 legit?  This is a refurbished computer, purchased through Amazon but done by some small vendor.  It would be an odd thing for it to have been smoked out only now, after several years of use, but not impossible.

      So this could be fun.  For a given value of "fun."  I'm going to noodle around a little more and decide if I want to pull the pin right now or not.

Sturgeon's Law And The Recommendation Engine

      A modern truism holds the "The Internet drives us apart" or "Social medial encourages extremism."  I think it's at least partially true -- but why does this happen, and how?

      It may be the intersection of two things: recommendation engines and Sturgeon's Law.

      Recommendation engines?  The do great things when you're looking for a film or TV show to stream -- Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or whoever has been keeping track of what you've been watching, and provides a whole category of "things you might like."  The more you watch, the better those suggestions match your tastes. 

      Hooray, right?

      Well--  Musical acts (for instance) get sorted pretty severely.  To get onto the machine's to-be-recommended to people who like X, Y and/or Z list, they've got to be objectively good.  Untalented acts never break that threshold.  Unskilled musicians never break the threshold.

      That "threshold" is where Sturgeon's Law comes in.  The law itself cautions that "90% of everything is crap."  One of the origin tales has Theodore Sturgeon on a panel of judges reading short stories submitted for publication at a science fiction convention; the slush piles are high and the material is, well, not so great.  One of the judges sets down an especially bad example and says, "Most of these stories are crap!"

     Sturgeon agrees, "Sure.  But ninety percent of everything is crap."

      That's one version.  James Gunn remembers something both kinder and more pointed.

      Music is pretty well sorted for quality.  Films and movies, for me it's close but not great; there's a lot of chaff to sift through.  Book recommendations from the smart software are even more hit-or-miss.

      But head off in a less mass-audience direction and things get strange fast -- and that's a problem.  My Hidden Frontier stories rely on playing fast and loose with history; the FTL drive is independently discovered at least three times and stolen twice, and some of that happens during WW II and just after.  It only takes one video or web page about "WW II flying saucers" or the post-war Byrd Antarctic Expedition to end up with some very strange stuff coming up next, entirely ahistorical and often pushing offensive political ideas or worse.  And letting those play just points you at even weirder and crazier stuff. When people say, "It must be true!  I researched it on the Internet," that's the kind of "research" you can end up with: 90% of those recommendations point to utter crap.

      The software can only work with what's there.  Flood the topic with crazy, conspiracy-theory stuff and made-up revisionist history, and where do the recommendation engines aim you?  Yep -- right at it. Get two layers in and you're in Crazytown.

      Be mindful of it. It's a bad neighborhood.
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* As an experiment, I started with "Six Underground," got Zero7 after that, then a Chet Faker video I'd never heard but enjoyed (not what it first appears -- there's narrative depth there, also considerable degree-of-difficulty points), followed by Talking Heads "Psycho Killer" and White Stripes "Seven Nation Army."  The Rolling Stones are up next.  It's pretty good guessing.

Our Political Class, At Their Near-Worst

      At their best, politicians can inspire or (thanks to a good choice in speechwriters) amuse.  But at their (non-criminal) worst?

      Oh, my dear heavens.  It's important to remember that these are the people who, as kids, spent much of their time campaigning for Student Council and arguing over minutia if they won; the kids who schemed and conspired to become Prom royalty or spent endless hours practicing so they could lead the jai alai team.  The one thing many of them never did was study the dull, boring stuff like math, history, geography or science, and they certainly avoided Shop and Home Ec.

      And thus we get Congressthings worrying Guam might flip over, advocating for the unlimited printing of paper money or claiming a voluntary, free vaccination program is akin to the Holocaust.  It's cringeworthy, and made even more so by partisans wanting to claim that A) what their guy or gal said wasn't really that outrageous and it was really parody besides, plus B) have you heard what the other side's idiots have said?

      Yeah, no.  I've seen the clips.  These nitwits mean it when they threaten to nationalize an oil company or shrug off deadly civil unrest as no big deal.  Furthermore, there is no Grand Compensating Balance of damfoolishness: what conservative witlings say is not cancelled out by what liberal witlings say, and vice versa: it's additive.  Idiocy on the part of elected officials just piles up, higher and higher, dumber and dumber, like the dung-heap under a garderobe.

      Pretending you don't notice the smell doesn't make it go away.

      When you vote, no matter who you vote for, I beg you: check their record (especially public utterances) and don't vote for idiots.  Whatever else you do, we have got to start sieving out the ones who are only getting in on ideological purity and other people's money.  I'm starting to miss LBJ and Spiro Agnew pretty badly; they were many things, a lot of which were negative, but at least they weren't nitwits.  No matter how happy a politician's positions and attitudes may make you, if they're ignorant or stupid, once elected they will do more harm than good.  We can't afford it.

Do Dandelions Grow On Your Planet, Too?

      I've been wondering since the pandemic and January 6th if maybe I'd wandered into the wrong dimension or been sent to some kind of Hell put together by the lowest bidder, but never really all that seriously....

     At least, not until yesterday, when I went on a walking inspection of the grounds and outside equipment at the North Campus.

     Nice, sunny weather, freshly mowed grass along the lanes sprinkled with dandelions.  Dandelions, but something was off.  They seemed paler than usual, more a light lemon yellow than sunny yellow.  I took a closer look and had to look again, and then at other examples: every plant had multiple flowers on a single stem.  I shivered.  There were several stems on each plant, like a normal dandelion, but the flowers were wrong and the more I looked, the wronger they got.  The leaves were hairy and rounded, and a darker green.

     Dimensional portal?  Wrong planet?  Nope.  Catsears.

     Hypochaeris radicata, if you want to get technical about it.  A relative of the dandelion.  The common name is because of the leaves, furry and with a rounded point, like a cat's ears.

     I have never seen them at the site before but we've got them now, and plenty of them.  They're all over the U.S. and you might not notice they were anything but regular dandelions, out the window of a moving car.

Off To The Doctor, Again

      This is a regular follow-up with a specialist for the shortness of breath.  At this point, I think nearly everything has been ruled out except being significantly out of shape, but I'll see what the professional has to say.  In the meantime, I'm trying to do some kind of physical activity every day and increase it over time. 

Raised Flowerbed

      It's been more like a razed flowerbed.  Last summer, I started to clear and replant the small raised flowerbed in front of Roseholme Cottage, and found myself stymied by the mechanics of getting some fresh dirt delivered.  Prices were...disproportionate.  Amazon didn't have what I needed and the nearby places couldn't keep it in stock for anything but in-person shopping, and they sold out quickly even at that.

      I spent the height of the pandemic avoiding any in-person contact that wasn't strictly necessary and the garden wasn't.  So it sat, weedy and unhappy-looking.

      The weeds came back in force this year and decided I'd had enough.  I'm vaccinated, the pandemic appears to be receding, and -- best of all -- the pile of chipped-stump "mulch" in the back yard has been sitting for a couple of years.  The stuff at the center is pretty fair dirt.

      So Sunday, I spent the afternoon weeding the raised back back to bare earth (and weed-barrier ground cloth, the existing layer of dirt having become pretty thin).  Then I hauled three wagonloads of mulchy soil around from the back yard.  It still needs a couple more, and probably four bags of garden soil, and then I can see about filling it up with wildflowers and maybe a few fancier ones.  This keeps the bees out of trouble, too -- otherwise they like to hang out around the front porch, hoping the hostas, mint and catnip will bloom. (We have even more mint this year.  It co-exists with the catnip and they're not difficult to tell apart.) 

Speaking Of Being Out Of Shape....

      Today was just about a non-starter.  I made some breakfast and watched cartoons,* did a very little house-cleaning, laid down, got up for a late-afternoon snack and a little more cleaning followed by vegetating in front of the tube, and I'm about to go lay down again.

      Yeah.  Maybe tomorrow.
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* MeTV, one of the over-the-air "little networks," has brought back Saturday morning cartoons.  Thank you!

Brunch, Hooray!

      Tamara and I went to Gallery Pastry Shop for brunch; I have not had one of their amazing omelets for over a year, but today I had one and the wonderful fresh fruit brulee for dessert.  How I have missed it!

      The bicycle ride there and a longer one afterward left me pretty exhausted.  I have missed being in shape, too, and it's going to be a much longer journey back to that than it was to brunch.

Thumb Repair, Step One

     Back on the 28th of March, I went to check that the back door was locked and fell down the three steps that lead from the kitchen to a landing just inside the back door, at the head of the stairs to the basement.  I reached out in the semi-darkness, flailing for the doorknob, and jammed my right thumb against it good and hard.  The immediate reaction was a big blood blister under the thumbnail, and I wrote about it the next day.

     Longer-term, there was some pain and swelling, and my thumb developed a kind of "detent," a click in the motion as I bent it at the knuckle.  I figured it would go away over time, and told my doctor as much at a routine appointment a few days later when she offered a referral to a hand specialist.

     It didn't go away.  It got worse, and affected my grip.  I started using my left hand more, but that thumb has some arthritis from an old injury, and then I had two thumbs aching, keeping me awake at night.

     So I did the grown-up thing, and told my doc I'd better see the hand-doctor after all. It was another two weeks wait for that, but yesterday, the man had a look.

     "Oh," says he, "We see this a lot.  The tendon swells up after an injury and starts sticking in the little tunnel it runs in.  It's like a cable that runs over pulleys.  It comes from muscles in your forearm, up the carpal tunnel, and on into your thumb, and that's where it's sticking.  It's called 'trigger finger.'"

     In fact, the the little "jump" in motion feels a lot like the break of a trigger.  Treatment consists of two stages: first, they shoot you up with -- I think -- cortisone or some corticosteroid.  About half the time that's all it takes.  If that doesn't work,  they do a little outpatient surgery in which they go in and open up the passage in your thumb for the tendon, and that's got a 90% or better success rate. (That's got to take the surgical equivalent of watchmaker's tools.)

     They numbed me up and gave me the shot, leaving my thumb bloated and no more sensitive than a block of wood.  The numbness had mostly worn off by this morning, the residual pain was gone by noon.  It still has the "trigger finger," but much less, and the specialist had said the pain would go away first, and the clickiness would take some time to fade, if it was going to.  I have another appointment next month; if things get better, I can cancel it.  If not, we'll try the surgery.

     The hand specialist was quick, competent, and had the kind of self-confidence that inspires trust: been there, done that, happy to fix one more.

Yet Another Day

      Another day of being fed up with people's wilful ignorance.  I should pull the plug on my Facebook account.  I gave up drinking and smoking, after all....