ㅁ In hospital, I realized I was dead: a ghost abroad in lands just dimly lit. I wandered past the wails of those in pain aware of only dust and aimless paths.
Month: January 2022
Caveat: never gonna be easy
The whole vaccination thing… is quite dispiriting. The unexpectedly high number of people I interact with who are vaccine-reluctant seems like a summary of our current cultural atmosphere of distrust in institutions and distrust in science. And yet that distrust also often seems legitimate and justified. We are evolving from what sociologists call a “high trust society” to a “low trust society.” Typically, the low trust societies, with their opaque social norms, struggle to advance, and often result in so-called “failed states.”
My own perspective is: trust, whether in individuals and personal relationships, or in society more broadly, often requires a leap of faith. One must simply decide to trust in something because it’s the right thing to do. I guess that’s my approach. Your views may differ.
I read weird things online, almost every day.
Today, I read an article about a new, more low-tech approach to developing another COVID vaccine. It can be found here. The main point seems to be – a lot of money and effort was expended with all the high-tech vaccines, but ultimately this drove up the price and lowered the worldwide rate of vaccination, especially in lower-income countries (where most humans are). Taking a more low-tech approach could have saved many lives, and could have advanced the cause of achieving herd immunity. That’s fine, but as a counterpoint, it still seems to me that the “rate of confirmed deaths” points to institutional failures, and not a failure of vaccination regimes, specifically. This is the graph I check most often, here. Why are equally-wealthy and developed countries like the US and South Korea so different? And, yet, wait… perhaps now they are converging?
Caveat: Poem #1983 “Slide”
ㅁ If Christmas were a country road, the presents made of ice then that would be my daily drive and really not so nice.
Caveat: 3 jobs
When people ask me what I “do” – meaning what my work is – I don’t really feel comfortable just saying I’m working doing matting and framing, 2-3 days a week, in the gift shop. It’s unimpressive. It makes me feel like I’m a layabout, a slacker.
So I tell them I have 3 part-time jobs. It’s just that two of them are essentially “unpaid.” This sounds more like I keep busy. Which I think is actually accurate. Besides my matting and framing job at the gift shop, my other two jobs are: a part time helper / carer for my uncle (to the extent he tolerates that), and a part time systems administrator and designer for a group of hobbyist websites. Somewhat obliquely, I’ve written exactly this thinking before, on this blog.
Today I wanted to write about a sort of 3-way categorization / classification I came up with for my 3 jobs. I rate each job on the dimensions of:
- time – what kind of demands it makes on my time
- challenge – what kind of demands it makes on my ability and talent
- emotions – what kind of emotional demands it makes
Here it is.
My first job – caregiver to a reluctant caregetter:
- easy in terms of time – it probably adds up to less the 10 hours a week, the stuff I do to help him specifically
- easy in terms of challenge – the work isn’t hard; sometimes repetitive or frustrating, but generally not difficult
- stressful in terms of emotions – it’s emotionally quite difficult to work with someone who more often than not resents my efforts to help and frequently denies needing help
My second job – the gift-shop matting and framing clerk:
- easy in terms of time – I only work at most 20 hours / week, often less
- stressful in terms of challenge – the job isn’t actually challenging, but… well, the commute is
- easy in terms of emotions – there’s not much emotional energy required (aside from stress)
My third job – world’s least-paid linux systems analyst and website designer:
- stressful in terms of time – the server often has a very demanding schedule, and it can take a lot of time to get things working right; I probably invest 40 hours per week
- easy in terms of challenge – the job actually is challenging, but in a way that I enjoy, so I think it doesn’t count
- easy in terms of emotions – there’s not much emotional energy required (aside from stress)
So I guess there’s no reason I’m writing this, except I like to analyze and classify things.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Poem #1982 “Layers”
Caveat: the aliens within
I read weird things online, almost every day.
Today, I read an article about how cancer cells grow nanotubes and use them to suck mitochondria out of immune cells, like little teeny-tiny vampires. The article can be found here.
The “aliens within” are our body’s own cells. Sometimes they go rogue, and become cancer cells, which are definitely alien.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Poem #1981 “Wave function collapse”
Caveat: Might just be a SQL hack
I read weird things online, almost every day.
Today, I read an article about using a commercial relational database to process large (very large) linear algebra problems. These type of linear algebra problems, often with 1000’s of dimensions (rows x columns) in matrices, are typically found in running neuron-net simulations such as are used in contemporary machine-learning algorithms (the type of of tools behind the magic of e.g. google translate).
The article can be found here. I suppose the reason I read it at all is because I used to work with relational databases, and I have a vague but slightly comprehensible memory of the principles of linear algebra, it being one the few advanced math topics I actually mastered before my college math-major career crashed and burned in 1984. I don’t claim any deep understanding, but I liked the idea of hacking a relational database to do this other type of work – it definitely feels like a kind of “hack” – but a useful one that could end up making large neural-net algorithms more manageable, which opens the way for new, more complex machine-learning applications. Useful hacks often become state-of-the-art for the following generation of programmers, and get grandfathered into important processes, languages and applications. The whole thing just sort of hovers there on edge of understanding, which seems to be where I generally situate my technical reading, these days.
Meanwhile, I saw no notable tree today.
Caveat: Poem #1980 “New year, new weather”
ㅁ Last year, it had snowed. This year, it's now raining hard. Piles of snow, undone.