Read This

      An interesting post on "Activism" over at Sebastian's.  Worth reading -- and it's worth seeing all the wheel-spinning and infighting in the comments, too.

      The American Revolution succeeded because of a focus on what the States had in common; the Constitution was adopted because the drafters focused on the shared interests of States, to the point of making terrible compromises with one another so that a mutually acceptable Federal government could be put in place.

      If you want to move forward -- or even just not move backwards -- better stop carping and sniping over side issues and fealty to personalities, and zero in on the issues.

      And for pity's sake, calling politicians cutesy names and entertaining paranoid fantasies may well be all kinds of fun, but they don't move the pointer.  Maybe take up needlepoint instead?

Not Much Faith In Spring

      The weather this Spring has been typical of Indiana, a day of lovely sunshine and temperatures anywhere from warm to chilly followed by a day or two of clouds and rain, on the cold side moe often than not.

      Usually, I greet Spring with joy, delighting in the return of green growth and warmth.  This year?  I'm not so happy.  I don't trust it.  Events have let me down -- the promise of 2020 became ashes before that Spring and turned ever more bitter as the year wore on, protests and unrest kept growing, and people turned away from science and facts in favor of whatever nonsense they found most comforting.

      That trend is continuing.  A substantial minority of Americans are avoiding coronavirus vaccines for reasons that vary from mistaken through spurious to risible.  They will serve as a pool of infection and mutation that preserves the threat, especially if they stop social distancing and stop wearing masks for face-to-face interaction.  Okay, government is a hammer, even if the problem is swatting flies or threading needles -- but it is the sharpest hammer we have, and the pointy end consists of thousands of your fellow citizens working hard to the stem the tide of infection, not eeeevil Bill Gates chortling like a silent-movie villain.

      In the first part of this month, I wrote that another wave of infections was likely.  It is now underway.  I'm sick and tired of staying six feet or more away from people and limiting individual interactions to fifteen minutes or less.  I'm tired of wearing a mask and more than irked that over the past year, I have only been to work (alone 99 percent of the time), the grocery store (not more than once a week), my doctor and dentist (twice each) and the home-improvement store (three times, early on).  Everything else except one outdoor meal last Fall has been delivery, drive-up or virtual.  I want this to be over -- but wanting does not make it so.  It's not over until it's over, and that's not just yet.

      The world keeps on getting greener out there, and the flowers keep unfurling and looking towards the sun.  I keep hoping I'll find some reason to think things will get better.

Monday Morning Round-Up

      In which I write about multiple things.

      Suez:
      Late word this morning is that they're making progress.  The stuck cargo ship is at least partially freed and facing in the right direction.  Traffic may be moving in the canal by the end of the day or tomorrow.

      Stop for a minute and consider the level of embarrassment: these are the descendants of the people who built the Pyramids, inheritors of the legacy of a culture that set up huge statues and grand temples...and they were struggling to free a stuck ship.   They are not going to stop until that thing is on the move.

      Georgia:
      I'm not going to discuss the pros and cons of various laws politicians, at least ostensibly, enact to make sure elections are fair, free of cheating, and equally accessible.  People's honest opinions and perceptions vary widely.

      I am going to address the foolhardiness of sticking in mean-spirited "gotcha!" jabs like Georgia's prohibition on bringing water (or food or any other drink) to people waiting in line to vote.  Looking at the wording, it appears to have been tacked on to an uncontroversial ban on bribing or otherwise attempting to influence people as they wait to vote.  Adding the water ban was a stupid move, one that will result in stronger and better-organized opposition to the law -- and it wouldn't make a bit of difference if every other provision in the law was logical, necessary and wise.

      Georgia's GOP-dominated legislature has shot themselves in the foot, making the Republicans look bad and giving the Democrats a powerful issue to get voters to polls.  Whatever else it may be, the law as written was inept realpolitik and this part of it will have unintended consequences.

     Politicians, it's 2021.  People will read your legislation, no matter how dull, and they will look for loopholes and weak points.  Don't be jerks.  It will come back on you.

      Me:
      I have been increasingly clumsy recently, possibly due to seasonal allergies ramping up and affecting my balance.  Or maybe it's just age.  Last night, I went to check the back door before bedtime and slipped on the three steep steps that lead from the kitchen to the door landing.  I overbalanced, reached out for the door handle, missed, and stabbed my right thumb and thumbnail into the hard metal with much of my weight behind it.  It raised a big blood blister on the tip of my thumb and under the end of the nail almost immediately.

      I iced my thumb for an hour, but an hour after that, it was throbbing and so tender that I had to scrub up, sterilize a needle, and lance the blister.  My thumb is still very tender this morning and it is interfering with activities.  At least the injury is not on the side of my thumb, so I can still work the spacebar.

Cats And Their Ways

      Cats are quirky creatures.  I have been fortunate to have shared my life with many who wanted to be with me.  Huck will nearly always come to snooze on my shins when I lay down to sleep; Rannie Wu came to prefer sleeping next to me or even cradled in my arms.  Years ago, I had a cat named Janie (sister to Charlotte and Emily.  Tommy was their brother) who would come rushing from wherever she was to lay on me whenever I went to bed, singing happy burbles as she scurried.

      Holden Wu burbles, too, and he likes to spend time with me.  While he sleeps in my bed some nights, he prefers to snooze with Tamara.  But during the day, he has a favorite spot with me whenever I'm on the desktop computer: the right-side typewriter shelf of my desk.

      Holden normally makes happy sounds as he gathers himself to leap.  That's good, because for many years, I have put my breakfast plate on that shelf.  A few seconds of warning is nearly always sufficient for me to get my plate clear.  He lands with amazing lightness for a fifteen-pound cat, and settles himself quite happily.  If he gets bored, he'll try to gnaw on my wrist, though he is learning it is Not A Good Idea.

      Occasionally, he doesn't make a sound beforehand.  This morning, I had settled down with eggs poached in chili* when he tootled and leaped so quickly that I barely had time to get the bowl out of the way!

      I've made a new spot to the left of my keyboard for breakfast.  A lap full of chili and a surprised cat might be a bit much.
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* This is remarkably good, a Tex-Mex take on eggs pomodoro.  This morning I used canned chili instead of leftover home-made and had to go with the organic stuff after discovering the last can of mild Hormel chili had lost its seal.  Still pretty good, despite the tofu -- and  more evidence of the value of keeping a well-stocked pantry.

Latkes

      It was a beautiful day today.  I goofed off -- did a little laundry, started up my motor scooter just to make sure it would run, and made latkes for breakfast.

     They're not as easy as they look; I'd made a try at them in the past and wasn't very happy with the result.  But I had a big potato and a new recipe, so why not try again?

     You begin by grating the potato -- I use an old-fashioned "All-In-One" grater, so I cut the potato into quarters longways, and grated it into a bowl. (If you're using fresh onion, grate in about a quarter of one.  I cheated and added onion powder.)   Then you squeeze as much moisture as you can from it, push it to the sides of the bowl, and beat an egg in the open space.

     You're going to want an eighth to a quarter-inch of hot oil in the bottom of a large skillet, so start that, using your preferred oil.

     Mix a quarter-cup of flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a half-teaspoon of coarse salt and a quarter-teaspoon of freshly ground pepper.  I went ahead and mixed the egg and potatoes, then added the flour and other ingredients a little at a time while stirring.  I added onion powder to the flour, a bit more than a teaspoon, and I could have used more.  Once everything's been absorbed, drop heaping tablespoonfuls of the batter into the hot oil and flatten with the spoon.  Fry them five minutes or until golden-brown, flip, flatten with the spatula, and give them five more.  (If any of them aren't not cooked enough, give them more time.)
     I was happy with how they turned out.  They're traditionally served with applesauce or sour cream.  I used a little truffle-infused hot sauce instead.
     You can scale up from the quantities I have given for one baking-size potato, which makes enough for two people.

And In Florida, They're....

      They're what, in Florida?  Dying in the streets?  Booming economically?  Florida's approach to the pandemic has been criticized and praised, and right now they're trying to keep Spring Break from becoming too broken without sending all those high-spending students back to their dorms -- but the real story is a lot more nuanced than the simplistic narratives of Left and Right. 

     A writer at The Atlantic dug into it.  He found a lot to chew on.  It's worth reading, though nobody's preferred narrative holds up.  That last statement probably deserves to be inside a fortune cookie.

Semi-Smart Machine

      We -- by which I mean our Facilities guy and his subcontractor -- installed one of those big, portable air-conditioners at the North Campus earlier this week, to help an ailing cooling system limp along for a few more months before we have to take it out behind the barn and do it mercy.

      The hulking gadget ran for two days and then shut itself down, displaying an incomprehensible glyph where it should show the temperature setting, plus a red indicator next to a legend reading "TANK FULL."

      While I did spend a wild moment wondering if it meant our Sherman had a full compliment of personnel aboard, in short order it dawned on me that the thing was trying to tell me that it was waterlogged.

      This was a mystery.  Facilities (et al) had carefully attached a long hose to the proper fitting, and routed it through the labyrinth to the basement sump fifty feet away and over a dozen feet lower.  Being of an investigative mind, I fetched a five-gallon pail and started to pry the drain hose from the barb.

      It started dribbling out grayish water long before the hose came free.  I had sudden doubts about the wisdom of  uncorking an unknown volume of water in a room filled with electrical machinery, shoved the hose back in place, sent a couple of e-mails to my boss and Facilities, fetched a lot of paper toweling and returned to the machine.

      Once the hose was off, it shot a jet of water mostly into the bucket (and the rest on me, yech), maybe a quart total, and began blowing out cold air like it was supposed to.  It even had the right temperature reading.  I put the hose back on, checked my e-mail, and discovered Facilities was en route and had asked me to do what I just did.

      I tried taking a wet-vac to the drain hose at the sump.  Nope!  Blocked.

      Back to the air-conditioner, which had shut down again.  Facilities showed up, and we eventually found a hidden blockage in the drain hose and cleared it.

      Those huge air-conditioners have a very small tank for water that condenses on the cooling coils and runs off.  Once it fills up, a pump empties it (permanently-installed systems usually just have a gravity feed, but portables may have to make water run uphill).  If the level gets too high or the pump sees too much back pressure, the cooling shuts off.  Oops!

Your AI Said What?

      "AI," my rear end; they're chatbots and related utilities.  Very sophisticated, neural-network-driven chatbots, but they don't quite pass the Turing test, not yet.  Thery may be able to sort your socks, but they stumble trying to sort your photographs  And there's been an off-and-on flap, because when you release a chatbot into the wild  -- or into the neticulture of the U.S. and European-dominated Internet -- it tends to come back sounding and behaving more than a little racist.  It comes back able to tell white people from one another with ease, but struggles with women and non-white people, and if you're in both categories, well, good luck.

      Chatbots (etc.) don't have a conscience; they don't know right from wrong and they can't read subtext or social cues.  They don't know the difference between fourteen-year-old punks talking big and a symposium (ancient Greek for "drinking party," BTW) of Methodist pastors.  Most normal people are aware of this, and aware that social media is dominated by the biggest mouths with the greatest amount of free time.  Chatbots do not.  They also don't know demographics; the general collection of software engineers is younger, whiter and more male than the general population, and it's very easy for them to write software and provide data sets that reflect the lab and not the country or the world and not notice.

      Of course this has become politicized -- hasn't everything?  The New York Times ran an article about it on 15 March (you're on your own with their paywall, kids, just know there is a way) and, predictably, the more conspiracy-theory-inclined pro-Trump crowd* has decided if The Times is agin it, they will be fer it -- and therefore, according to them, if the AI says an all-Black population is problematic, it must be true.

      There are a number of defects to this, starting with the assumption that the NYT has less chance of being right than a blind sow does of finding an ear of corn.  (I figure they're at least as lucky as an average female hog.)  Then there's "The computer must be right," a flashback to attitudes of the late 1950s or early '60s when the machines were tantamount to magic for many people.  They weren't then and they aren't now; at best, they're only as clever as the people who write the code that runs on them and no less subject to bias.  But best of all, let's talk about The Bahamas: one of the richest countries in the Western hemisphere, right up there with the U. S. and Canada; they've got 95% literacy...and the population is 90% Black.  Nope, sorry; it only takes a single example to demolish the assumption.  The AI's wrong -- and so are you, if you agreed with it.

      We can build fair-minded AI.  Even a random sample of Silicon Valley software engineers, an overwhelmingly young, Caucasian, nerdy and male group, can do so -- if they're aware of the need for it and make the effort.  If they don't write lazy code.  If they pick their input data to model the general population, and not themselves and their co-workers.

      It's not a culture war.  It's good program-writing.

      Hello, world.
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* Which is to say, "Q-adjacent," analogous to the "...but they sure had kewl tanks!" fanboys of WW II Germany or Stalin's USSR.  I'm not impressed.

Well, That Was...

    Fun?  Holden Wu went to the vet for his yearly checkup this morning.  I worked from home before and after and then--

     A headache had been creeping up on me.  I stood up to go to the kitchen and take my usual acetaminophen and aspirin, and nearly fell over.  It was far worse than I had realized.

     I have been more or less vegetating for the past three hours.  Took my drugs but I'm still shaky. 

Corned Beef And Cabbage, A Photo Essay

      Last Monday, our neighborhood market had fresh corned beef again.  So I bought one and froze it for the weekend, to try the method I used for a recent Sunday roast and add some turnips and cabbage.

     (All photos by Tamara Keel.)

     A lot of turnips and cabbage.  So much so it needed an overwrap to close up the roasting pan.

     It cooked down well.

     The corned beef was nice.

     With the cabbage set into a covered dish, the remainder of the vegetables are revealed: potatoes on the bottom with turnips, carrots and celery on top of them, followed by little sweet peppers and exotic mushrooms.

     It plated up nicely!

     It turned out every bit as good as I had hoped.  About an hour in, I was worried the beef was getting a little too done.  Adding a little water with balsamic vinegar in it solved that -- a neat trick, though it's very much a matter of experience and informed guesswork.

     It cooked for three hours total.  All of the vegetables except the cabbage wedges and mushrooms went in with a little over an hour left; and they were added with 45 minutes to go.  I could have probably added them all right at one hour or just under.  Seasoning was what comes with the corned beef, plus a couple of bay leaves.  You don't add salt to this; there's plenty in the corned beef and it does the job on the vegetables.

Oh, We're All Idiots

      A commenter who will not be published left a single sentence in response to my joking post-vaccine piece, to inform me that I was an idiot.

      Imagine, if you will, my surprise.  There I was, thinking I was quite clever and had All The Answers™, only to learn that a random stranger on the Internet had determined that I was an idiot.

      Just why he had decided that was unclear; he provided no details.  Was it my flippant joke about the vaccine and the foolish fears of some people?  Was it for getting vaccinated at all?  (Look, pal, next time you can be the sixtyish woman in less than ideal health, and we'll see how quickly you go for a vaccine.)  Was it for being extremely unenthusiastic about President Trump (who I was no fan of from the outset -- you can go back and check; you'll also see I was even less pleased with Secretary Clinton and I'm not exactly jumping for joy over President Biden*) and his effects on what used to be a reliable party whose worst impulses were slightly easier to curb or avoid than those of the other big party?

      I don't know.  It doesn't matter.  What I do know is we're all making our way through life by guessing.  Sometimes we make very well-informed guesses; sometimes it's a leap in the dark.  But ultimately, there's very little we know with absolute certainty -- and some of those things, we're wrong about.  Against a vast and impersonal universe, we're all idiots, nearly all the time.

      So get over it, make your own choices, and move on.
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* Five hundred and thirty-five seats in all of congress, fifty state governors, at least a dozen more really well-known politicians, and yet the candidate pool is a disappointment to me, year after year.  Okay, it's a horrible job and no matter who you are about half of the citizenry will loathe you, but still....

Ferfectly Pine

      So, I pfgot the vaccine yesterday -- the Pfizer one -- and I pfave expfizened nothing pfworse than a pfore arm. 

     Otherwipfize, I pfeel pfine.  Ia!  Ia!  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!  Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia!

     ...What...?