Friday Notes (Feb 6, 2025)

Today’s Friday Notes post is a small first — I’ve never published one on the sixth of the month (until today). A bit more significantly, this one is early in the month. I’ve discovered a strong bias towards publishing these posts in the latter half of the month: only 14 posts before the 16th of the month; 44 after (very close to exactly a 25/75 split).

As it turns out, I have plenty for a post (including some stuff left over from the previous post). And, of course, there’s always the weather and various other charts.

So, let’s get to it…

There is an unfortunate number of social media accounts that, one way or another, masquerade as, or at least strongly suggest they represent, a known public figure. For example, there are some YouTube channels that present themselves as “Richard Feynman” channels and offer his lectures. Except, on some it’s not even his voice, let alone an actual lecture he gave.

They never provide video, just voice, sometimes Ai-generated. More frequently, the script is apparently Ai-generated from his texts. Because my hearing is so impaired, I’m not audio-oriented, never have been, so it seems weird to watch a “video” that’s a bunch of still images along with a (possibly fake) voice.

None of which is the point, just a minor conundrum for me. I like Richard Feynman and enjoy his writing and lectures, but when Ai steps into the picture so heavily, I’m no longer certain how trustworthy its content is. But again, not the point.

The point is that my heart sped up for all of two or three beats when I got this email (then reality and experience stepped in an asserted themselves):

I’ve mentioned Martin here often and talked about how his L.A. Story (1991) is one of my all-time favorites and in my eyes an almost perfect film. I followed his banjo music YouTube channel (though he hasn’t posted there in five years) and have bought some of his banjo CDs. I’ve been big fan since he began with that arrow through his head. And, unlike so many Hollywood figures, I have tons of respect for what I know of him as a person. He’s on a very small list of public figures I wish I knew as friends.

So, a few heartbeats of: Is it possible?!? …

No, of course not. Just another thirsty pretender, this one devoted to the work Steve Martin and Martin Short have done together. Great stuff, but not a YouTube channel I’ll subscribe to.

But it was a nice moment. 😂😏

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We’re getting a break now, but after the annual thaw, January was chilly:

No days anywhere near freezing from the 17th on. That brought the average high down to just over +20 degrees with an average low in the single digits. Quite a few sub-zero lows, too.

Compare to previous years:

A particularly chilly (or “brisk” as we say here) dip on the 23rd. Looks like a record low going back to 2013. (But almost certainly not a record compared to more historical Januarys.)

Fortunately, we didn’t get much snow (none at all since the 21st):

“Too cold to snow,” as they (in fact incorrectly) say.

I’m still working on some sort of “winter pain” chart. I added a “days below +10” category to this one (note these reflect the daily high temp):

Note to self: change the chart title. I went with “&” rather than “and’, which made the Oxford comma I’m addicted to look odd, so I left it out. I’d prefer it be “Freezing, Ten, and Zero”. I do like the new category. Might be interesting to see “days below +20”.

It just occurred to me that it might be interesting to see similar data for a given winter, either by month or by week. 🤔

I still need to factor snow and wind into the pain index, though.

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Given the chill, it’s nice to remember what summer will bring:

The best part is that this park is walking distance east of my home.

I’m very lucky I found this place. Even walking to the mailbox is pretty:

Especially in the fall:

Walking distance north is a lovely small (but fishable) lake:

(As always with nice photos and most charts here, click for a big’n.)

Yep. Very lucky, and I know it (and give thanks).

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For a long time, I’ve been using this chart to track my posts:

It was, for instance, in my wrap up for 2025, which had both the old version that tracked only my WordPress LLC posts and the new version that tracks posts from all three extant blogs.

Which is great, but it’s increasingly hard to fit the yearly totals onto the graph without covering any of the bars. It used to fit nicely in that 2017 posting hiatus gap, but now it’s squeezed by the increasing number of years. There is also a future problem that it’s growing too long. On top of that, the code that generates it makes the function longer and more complex.

So, an immediate future task is just dumping that list entirely (next time I pass through that code), but I have already created a new chart for yearly totals:

The next time you see the monthly chart (probably on the blog’s 15th anniversary post this July), that ugly yellow list will be gone.

And good riddance.

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It’s something of a social troupe for an older generation to tell a younger generation their music “sounds all the same”. I never heard that from my parents — despite their Midwestern “squareness”, mom was a music teacher who schooled in Los Angeles and dad had some interest in the soft rock at the time (it was in fact he who got me into Simon & Garfunkel).

More to the point, both were seriously into classical music. An irony is that while they never said my music sounded all the same, I thought theirs did. I still have no ear for classical music. I like it okay, but I have a hard time telling one piece from another. (Some, of course, stand out, but generally speaking it tends to sound all the same to me.)

Yet my parents had this to me astonishing ability to hear a few bars of some random classical piece and immediately identify it. It seemed like magic.

Until I started getting into my own music. After years of listening to the music I loved, I found I had the same ability with my music that my parents had with theirs. Ah, ha! So, that’s how it works.

It’s a fascinating look into the pattern-matching abilities of our brains. Having trained them by listening to a body of music over and over, we gain the ability to recognize it. Just as we do with the faces of friends. (I’ve discovered I’m just a little face blind. It takes me a while to learn a face — the issue pops up watching movies where I’m not sure if a character from several scenes ago is the one I’m seeing now, especially with costume and makeup changes.)

But the mystery of my parents’ magical music-identifying ability turns out to be no mystery at all. Just a matter of learning to recognize friends.

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On the one hand, I keep forgetting to post this, but on the other hand, links to videos often rot (there are a number in my old posts that are broken, and I could never find a replacement, so they linger as broken links).

So, with mixed feelings, a really enjoyable lecture by the esteemed Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992):

She seems like an amazing human being. Among her many credits is designing the computer programming language FLOW-MATIC, which grew up to become COBOL, a hugely popular programming language. Hopper was instrumental in the development of COBOL.

[COBOL has the distinction of being the only programming language that helped me get a date. I needed to convert a COBOL program to C++ but didn’t know COBOL. I ran into a gal who said she knew it, so I asked her out. To help me go over the COBOL, of course. Which we did over dinner, but it turned out she didn’t know the language that well. We dated for a while anyway.]

She had very sensible views about computers and computing, though some are a bit outdated by advances since her time. Very enjoyable lecture for anyone interested in the history of computers.

Hopper used to hand out foot-long lengths of wire at her talks. They provide a visual illustration of how far light travels in one nanosecond.

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When I was a kid back in the 1960s, a package of 125 bendy straws would have seemed great riches. I recall how exciting it was on those rare occasions we treated ourselves to dining out and the soft drinks or iced tea came with bendy straws rather than the ordinary straight ones. Childhood thrills!

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Crystalize (clarify) or Calcify (harden)? As I get older, I find less sympathy for what I’ve labeled scientific FBS. I mean things such as SUSY, extra dimensions, the Block Universe Hypothesis (aka eternalism), string theory. holographic theory, faster-than-light drives and wormholes, and all the other theoretical ideas that have in common that no shred of physical evidence exists to support them. They are — at best — metaphysical guesses about what might be true.

Yet I’m also a long-time fan of Curt Jaimungal’s Theories of Everything YouTube channel, and a notable characteristic is his encompassing sympathy for theories I frankly tend to dismiss as not likely to be right.

[Yeah, I know: what the hell do I know? In my defense, I turn out to be right more often than not. It was one of the things that annoyed my ex-wife. A lot. But to be clear, I’m not saying I’m right and trained physicists are wrong. I’m saying I’m skeptical about ideas with no physical basis. Which is the main point I’m trying to make here.]

[[P.S. I have complained before about how, in the Sara Paretsky V.I. Warshawski stories, which I highly recommend to all lovers of private eye stories, VI’s friends never seem to figure out that she’s usually right.]]

Getting back to the point, firstly, I think one has to monitor oneself constantly to see if one’s ideas are clarifying or calcifying. I think it’s important to ask oneself, “When was the last time I changed my mind about something serious?” We need to look back and see if we’re evolving or stagnating. At the very least, always keep trying to learn new things. A changing viewpoint often comes along with that.

Secondly, why I’ve lost sympathy for fringe thinking, is that I see parallels between these nonphysical beliefs and other nonphysical (and in this case demonstrably false) beliefs such as climate denial or anti-vaccine stances as well as the thinking that led to the current political situation (on both sides).

At root, it’s a loss of contact with physical reality and facts.

And a lack of critical thinking.

Once again, Leon Wieseltier’s brilliant off-the-cuff ten-word summary of society from back in 2014:

“Too much digital; not enough critical thinking; more physical reality.”

Three clauses that hit to the heart of the matter. The latter two express the point I’m making here. We’re mired in fantastical bubbles and isolated from physical reality.

And here we are. The reality speaks for itself.

To be honest, while I genuinely appreciate the stance, and agree these theories should be explored, I sometimes secretly think Curt’s mind is so open there’s a risk of birds nesting there.

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In the last Friday Notes post I wrote about how I was tracking spam emails on my oldest email account (created in the 1990s, so it ended up on a lot of lists). I said January was shaping up to be a bumper crop.

Indeed:

Now February is off to a good start — 78 spam emails and counting.

In that post I mentioned the network issues I was having. My newish Lenovo laptop sees the Wi-Fi just fine but thinks it’s not connected to the internet. I wasn’t sure if the problem was the laptop, the Wi-Fi, or the DSL modem.

I think I’ve narrowed it down to the laptop. First, I observed a period of quiet after a BIOS update. Recently, twice, my probe app has gone from no errors for a long stretch only to begin having them at some point. In the most recent case, I started the probe on 1/30 @ 14:32 and it ran without errors until 2/2 @ 13:10.

I did a shutdown of the laptop (but not a restart), and the probe run error-free until 2/5. I did shutdown again when the errors started, and it has been error-free since:

I intend to continue probing and gathering data to determine with confidence it’s the laptop. I’m still under warrantee, so the next step will be engaging Lenovo’s customer service — to me a real test of a company’s worth. 🤞🏼

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That’s enough for this time. And now I have one more data point in the first half of the month:

It was tempting to wait for the 13th — that would still be in the first half of the month, but as you see, I’ve been there done that twice. Besides, I’ll have another chance next month and again in November.

One thing is as certain as certain can be: I’ll be posting on May 15th; the only chance I have this year to plug that gap.

Stay uncalcified, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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