Caveat: Links #100

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

An illustration from the internet.

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A quote.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” – HL Mencken


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Caveat: What?

It’s been a difficult couple of days. Yesterday I took Arthur to the VA clinic to see the Neurology department. This was something we were supposed to have done last year, but they’d been unable to schedule an appointment during the window of our time down here in Portland, and after an extended back-and-forth over the telephone, it had been decided to just wait until this year and try again.

The challenge was that, for really the first time, the doctors were addressing Arthur directly while using the term dementia. Arthur couldn’t really engage in denial in the moment, which is his standard strategy. He flat out denies he ever had a stroke, still, for example. He often comically denies that he is going deaf: “I’m not going deaf! There’s just some problem with my ears!” is a literal quote.

In the moment, he’s too polite to directly or combatively deny that he has dementia, but I could tell he was deeply upset and afterward and since, he’s been exceptionally obstreperous.

I messed things up much further, this morning, because I did the mistake I’ve been successfully avoiding for more than 4 years: I ran his hearing aids through the laundry. The problem here is that Arthur often takes out his hearing aids and instead of putting them into the little case they’re supposed to live in, he puts them into a pocket. When I do laundry at home, I have a fixed habit of going through his pockets to make sure nothing is in them – I’ve intercepted his hearing aids many times, this way. But here at Juli’s, thrown off my regular routine, and responding to Arthur’s complaint about a lack of clean clothes, I failed in my pocket inspection. His hearing aids went through the wash. One of them was quite damaged – plastic parts broken off and one bit missing. And of course who knows what damage to the electronics inside.

As things stand, I did a MacGuyveresque repair on the broken one, using some scotch tape and super glue, and we’ve tested them. One of them seems to work, the other seems to be stuck in some kind of reboot cycle. Good thing we’re scheduled to see an audiologist in a week. But… I’m super frustrated with VA audiology support, and skeptical that they’ll offer anything truly useful. As I remarked to Juli in the wake of the washing machine incident, “It’s not like Arthur was really using the hearing aids effectively, anyway.” The problem is that in combination with his cognitive deficits, it’s very, very difficult for Arthur to build new habits or learn new, fiddly procedures related to the correct use and care of his hearing aids. The result is that he doesn’t ever reach a point where he’s using them the way the designers imagined: always in, with all kinds of “bells and whistles” around an app on the smartphone that can link it to audiobooks, music, the TV, whatever. None of that is anything we can ever expect Arthur to master, at this point. He can’t even figure out how to turn on his smartphone, much less use it. Anything that wasn’t in his technological repertoire before 2018 will NEVER be in his repertoire. Old dog, no new tricks.

I feel terrible that all this is happening – that I was insufficiently diligent in doing things I knew needed to be done (i.e. about inspecting pockets, about getting anything useful from VA audiology). A failure of care.


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Caveat: Links #98

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

An illustration from the internet.

picture

A quote.

“Cumulative cultural evolution requires both the conservative impulse to imitate and the progressive impulse to tinker. These two processes — imitation and innovation — make up the ratcheting effect by which complex cultural products (e.g., institutions, practices, technologies, etc.) evolve over time.” – Brett Andersen


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Caveat: Links #97

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

An illustration from the internet.

picture

A quote.

“There is significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human.” – a US park ranger, on the issue of trying to bear-proof trash cans in national parks.


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Caveat: Noise

I have traveled to Oregon, for the next few weeks. Unlike previous stays at Juli and Keith’s house, I’m Arthur’s actual roommate here, this time – there are more limited options for one’s own space, these days, here (for those who are unfamiliar, Arthur is my elderly uncle, who has dementia and for whom I am a caretaker).

It’s noisy at night here, compared to at home. I had difficulty sleeping. Dogs bark all night, roosters start the day at 2 AM, neighbor people are talking outside of their houses and you can hear them, late at night. Being Arthur’s roommate is noisy too: he doesn’t actually snore, but he falls asleep with his audiobook playing into his ears at maximum volume (because he’s almost completely deaf at this point and somehow he derives some comfort from this cacaphony). It’s disconcerting to hear the story right on the edge of comprehensibility, like a television blaring in the next room. It’s probably just a soft background noise, for him. And he’s a restless sleeper (just as he’s often quite restless when awake, with all kinds of OCD-adjacent repetitive movements and tics). He noisily turns in the covers every few minutes. He farts and belches loudly in his sleep, too, and mutters softly to himself, things like ‘oh fuck’ and ‘shit!’ I feel like I’m rooming with Sancho Panza. I already knew all these things, but at home, with him being in his own room, I can somewhat dismiss it – it doesn’t effect me, he’s far enough away from where I’m sleeping that it doesn’t bother me, but I can still be tuned in if something goes wrong (eg one of his late night / early morning falls, as the most common example).


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Caveat: Poem #3019 “The peregrination”

ㅁ
The plan was: travel southward, fast.
 So airplanes did their thing, and cars.
The crowds were large; the city's vast.
 
The plan was: travel southward, fast.
 The traffic's not to be outclassed:
so many headlights - rushing stars.

The plan was: travel southward, fast.
 So airplanes did their thing, and cars.

– a triolet.


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Caveat: Links #96

Here are some links I found interesting- with minimal comment.

An illustration from the internet.

picture

Two quotes.

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” – Margaret Atwood

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” – Stafford Beer


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Caveat: Septolingo

I thought I’d offer an update on my continuing phone-based diversion with the language-learning app called Duolingo.

I still actually rather dislike the app – but after trying some other options, I feel it’s the best of a bad bunch. It’s the only one that I’ve tried that can run fully and reliably without an always-on internet connection, for example, which is an actual necessity for me given where I live (rural Alaska).

I sometimes sigh in disgust at the obvious linguistic shortcomings – it’s often clear that non-native-English speakers are being given free rein in providing material for the English facing language learner, and likewise that non-native-Spanish speakers are doing the same for the “Swedish for Spanish Speakers” program I’m working through. And that makes me wonder about the grammatical and idiomatic quality of the language I’m trying to learn, too. So if you try Duolingo, just always remember to assume it’s not a great or perfect snapshot of the language you’re trying to learn. Think of it as taking lessons from someone not much farther along than yourself, maybe?

But I have managed to spend at least 5 minutes (about 1 “lesson”) on Korean every day since I started the program, while riding on the bus to the airport on my last day of my short visit back to Korea, last Spring. And I think I’ve genuinely learned and even gotten comfortable with some Korean vocabulary that I was unfamiliar with before (which perhaps speaks only to how lousy my Korean ever was – it was always horribly domain-constrained, during my years living there).

Meanwhile, aside from my steadfast commitment to working on my Korean, I dedicate another 5-20 minutes a day with some other language. All of these other six languages were deliberately chosen for their level of expected difficulty for me (which is to say: fairly high).

I find it genuinely rewarding to try to puzzle through some obscure aspect of introductory-level Vietnamese or Swedish grammar, trying to guess at the pattern before finally breaking down and spending 2 hours of follow-up research on wikipedia or somesuch. Syntax is something I just plain enjoy learning about. Vocabulary is harder, for me. Each time I switch languages, I spend a few lessons making crazy-stupid mistakes until the 100 word passive vocabulary that’s been built up is reactivated.

I make a point of trying to keep all my seven languages on Duolingo “in sync” – though because Korean is the only one I commit to doing some of every single day, it always ends up ahead. But I make sure I distribute my  time to the others evenly, so that the “number two” language in the queue is always shifting. Here is a snapshot of my current “points” (“XP”) in my languages in Duolingo.

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I think my favorite language, by far, is Vietnamese. It’s also the hardest, for me – so I think, as with Korean, I’m specifically drawn to languages I find quite difficult.

I dislike that Duolingo shields users from learning to type “non Roman” scripts – so even the Korean (where I’m much more advanced than the other languages, which is entirely belied by my point totals above, because I “tested in” to the Korean quite deeply into the course, if that makes sense) doesn’t ask me to type answers in Korean. And that’s frustrating, because “typing Korean” is one skill I mastered quite early in my language-learning journey, and I could even win speed-typing contests against my students typing Korean on my phone when I lived there – just don’t ask what whatever it is I just typed means. I think typing would make the new vocabulary “stick” much more effectively, for me.

Nor do the Arabic, Greek, nor Ukrainian programs give me the option or opportunity to learn to type my answers in those languages – they just give you written-out choices. But meanwhile, those languages with Roman-based scripts have quite intensive requirements to type in answers, which leads to a higher level of word-shape memorization, by far. Vietnamese is the “weird” outlier in this dimension, because it is, nominally, a Roman-based script – so Duolingo insists on making me type it. But the number of diacritics for Vietnamese is painfully huge – people do weird “text art” using Vietnamese diacritics, because it offers so many possibilities. “Typing” Vietnamese on a phone keyboard is apparently an art too arcane to ever bother even trying to explain. You either know or you don’t. So I get lots of errors on my Vietnamese because I simply can’t figure out what combination of keys will give me the combination of diacritics I know that I need. But I think that over time having the requirement to type in answers increases longer-term retention of vocabulary, at least for me – I’ve always been a very visual and text-based learner. So I can sincerely say that even though the scores are all basically equal, so far my learning of Vietnamese, Welsh and Swedish are far in advance of the other three non-Korean languages (Ukrainian, Arabic and Greek), because of that typing requirement.

I still would give Duolingo only 3 stars. But I’m sticking with it. It provides one of the few genuinely enjoyable breaks in my day, these days, in my otherwise quite depressing life.


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Caveat: Links #95

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

An illustration from the internet.

picture

A quote.

“What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.” ~ Terry Pratchett


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Caveat: Links #94

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

An illustration from the internet.

picture

A quote.

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” – John Stuart Mill


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Caveat: Links #92

Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.

An illustration from the internet.

picture

A quote.

“The great trouble with religion – any religion – is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both.” – Robert A. Heinlein


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