October 2020 – Welcome to Third Age Thoughts

IT RETURNS! A Halloween Tremble-in-Place

– In which Dorn spins a terrifyingly true tale of a fight to the death—and beyond!

he wounds, both physical and emotional, from my bloody battles since July with Arum Italicum are slowly mending. The blisters on my hands from ripping these agressive aliens out of the ground by the throat have broken and healed, and the angry red weal on my leg where I was splashed with their alien acid-blood has gradually faded to the dull pink-gray of an ancient war injury.

I had hoped my repeated skirmishes with the wily Roman weed were now behind me, only fodder for whispered tales (retold here, here, and here) to scare the virtual children around the virtual campfire on a cold dark night.

Yesterday I was puttering around in the yard, and something out of place caught my eye—there in the yard, towering high (well, several inches) above the struggling grasses and weeds that make up our turf, was a single broad, variegated leaf growing straight up from out of the ground.

What could it be? I wondered. I hadn’t seen a weed like that before in our yard. Do we have a new immigrant? Suddenly, I felt my stomach drop and a wave of paranoia washed over me (you know, like when you first see the zombie out the window illuminated by a lightning flash on a dark stormy night)!

During all my fights with Arum Italicum (also known as “Italian lords and ladies” by those who have fallen under its imperious grasp), I was always fixated on the bright festive cluster of berries that make it such a sought-after ornamental plant in its native country of Transylvania. Well, that, and the hard-to-extract corms buried deep underground like frozen tundral mastadon corpses, from which the heinous herb shoots out its fruiting bodies. I realized I didn’t even remember seeing any leaves, or if I did, what they looked like.

Google to the rescue! With trembling thumbs, I did a quick query of “variegated spear-shaped leaves” that brought up a page full of images. “Maybe“, I told myself, “it’s some harmless plant, like spearmint, or, I don’t know, arrowroot. After all, this is far from my old Arum Italicum battleground. It’s not even downstream from it.” I held my breath as I clicked on the image that most resembled my lawn find, only much, much bigger.

“ITALIAN ARUM!” screamed the caption! It was the same fiendish fern that I thought I had consigned to a deep earthy grave in the local landfill!

So I was donning my hazmat suit (fool me once, you acid-spewing triffid!) for another turf war (ha-ha, get it?) with this invasive, Facebook-friending herbaceous hooligan, when I had another chilling thought: “If one of the plants was able to escape and propagate way over here, what might be happening at the original invasion site?”

So I calmed my trembling limbs, crept carefully over to the area of the original landing of these invaders, and peered at the ground illuminated with a single flickering candle (and the sun, of course)….

They were EVERYWHERE! An army of them! They were my own personal Birnam Wood coming to destroy my Dunsinane! If anything, it seemed like there were more of them than took part in the original invasion.

And all pretense of finery was gone—no bright berry caps raised up on jaunty stalks, just row upon row of these fierce jagged leaves, coming at me, closer, closer, CLOSER…
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

Thanks,
Dorn
10/21/2020

More and better updates! Cower in place 39

– in which Dorn again avoids thinking of new topics.

1 In my post looking forward ten years post-Covid (here), I joked that Facebook had achieved the status of a sovereign nation. I’m now reading a book that takes this conceit to a whole new level: Qualityland by the writer and (apparently) cabaret artist Marc-Uwe Kling. Reviews have called it “hilarious and terrifying” and compared this book to the love-child of a three-way between George Orwell, Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams.

The premise of the book is that the newly-renamed country of “Qualityland” has allowed all the commercial and information-management techniques of Amazon, Facebook, and Google to run to their logical extreme conclusions. All citizens are fully characterized by ubiquitous AI algorithms, to the point that all the goods and services they want or need are predicted and delivered to them “without the hassle of having to ask for them”.

But warning: the book is so chock full of clever ideas that it gets headachy to read sometimes, and the consequences of business decisions that seem plausible in today’s world, while almost always funny, are also sometimes horrific to Third-Agers like me who grew up in a world without AI. Also it trash-talks Pride and Prejudice.

Still, give it a shot for a good funny, scary read. Or just wait—I hear HBO has already signed for the movie rights to the book!

2 I now have objective proof that Mark Zuckerberg is the devil. After my bloody battle with invasive Arum Italicum, (chronicled here and here), I had hoped that I’d seen the last of that particular invader from the Old World.

But the evil Arum showed up again to get me when I was at my weakest—reading Facebook! I was innocently checking up on the doings of my friends and relations, when up popped an unsolicited ad, actually tempting me to pay money to get some new Arum Italicum plants. Oh, insidious! See how the invaders get in your head—if they can’t invade by one route, they find another.

3 I mentioned my own miminal contributions to finding a Covid treatment here. When I agreed to lend my computer’s down time to a massive computing project searching for Covid antagonists (literally, it’s the least I can do!), they gave me access to online statistics that claim to show the size and importance of my contribution. (That sentence ended up sounding pretty cynical. Can I believe nothing from the internet any more?)

Anyway, my contribution must be pretty significant, because they awarded me a medal for it. And not just some cheesy participation medal, this is a Gold medal for 90 days of partipation! Why, I have returned almost 600 computational results to the OpenPandemics project, and am now ranked as the 234,099th most prolific contributer worldwide (no lie!). It’s still not too late for you to join!

4 It would seem that the Illustrious Order of Immunati (revealed here) has a new member. President Trump yesterday announced his Covid immunity amid congratulations from his fans, skepticism from the medical community, and a flag from Twitter for “misleading Covid-19 information”. As a courtesy to my millions of micro-readers*, I will not make jokes that support or disparage any individual candidate, but I will repost an unattributed quote I saw on Facebook: “I got the China virus and I beat it, beat it very badly. Do you think Sleepy Joe would’ve beaten it? I don’t think so. Weak on crime, weak on immune systems. SAD!”

Illuminati spokesbeing E— R— would not come out from under the bed to comment.

Editor’s note: E— R— did not really refuse to come out from under the bed. In the patois of modern medical pseudo-journalism, she has been “Fauci-ed”.

Thanks, and, depending on your bent, Happy Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day.
Dorn
10/12/2020

Higher power: cower in place 38

– in which Dorn looks at another tool in the covid fight.

On a recent Zoom chat, one of the people mentioned that he had been out from work for the past week with a bad cold. I hope you don’t have “the big C” I quipped, then immediately worried that he might think I was asking if he had cancer. He didn’t misunderstand me, of course—it was obvious to all that I was asking if he had contracted COVID.

I’ve had cancer on my mind lately because a few days earlier we ended our six-month record of not entering any other buildings by visiting a dear friend in hospice. When we got there, her unmasked husband hustled us into the living room to say high to visiting family members, all unmasked, before heading to the back yard for an all-too-brief visit. Her spirits were high, though her energy was low, and it was good to see her. Still, afterward, we were rattled by the idea that we had gone into a house full of unprotected individuals who had gathered from all over.

I can totally see why coronavirus protection wasn’t high on the minds of our friend and her family—they had bigger and more immediate concerns. But it wasn’t just preoccupation, they seemed genuinely unworried. They are Republicans, so they might have some skepticism about the covid’s contagiousness and severity anyway, but more important, I think, is that they are devout Christians, and their faith is allowing them to see the bigger picture in a way I cannot.

I’ve heard some faith leaders try to explain the covid epidemic. The more sensational consider it a message, warning, or punishment from God for some discretion that the speaker, coincidentally, also thinks punishment-worthy.

More commonly, the message is to have faith that even the covid is part of some master plan that is a mystery to us mortals. The question of what caused the epidemic is left to natural science to explain. In this regard, the religious approach to covid is pretty much the same as the 17th century approach to the plague, as I discussed here. Daniel Defoe wrote of the Great London Plague of 1665:

We must consider it as it was really propagated by natural means, nor it is all the less a [divine] judgement for its being under the conduct of human causes and effects; for, as the Divine Power has formed the whole scheme of nature and maintains nature in its course, so the same Power thinks fit to let His own actings with men, whether of mercy or judgement, to go on in the ordinary course of natural causes.

Now, as back then, prayer is encouraged, to avert the disease, or to understand it, or simply to make one’s peace with the epidemic and its ravages.

An interesting paper was published online by Jeanet Bentzen recently on VoxEU, in which the author measured the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on prayer by counting Google hits. In her abstract, she writes:

In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using daily data on Google searches for 95 countries, this column demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis has increased Google searches for prayer (relative to all Google searches) to the highest level ever recorded.

Strong words indeed! But Bentzen’s data seem to bear her out. Google searches related to prayer follow an annual cycle, peaking around the most common religious holidays (Easter, Christmas, and especially the start of Ramadan). One of her graphs shows the normalized fraction of Google searches for prayer from the beginning of February 2020, when the world was just learning about covid, to April before the expected seasonal spikes for Easter and Ramadan:

To provide a sense of the magnitude of the prayer searches, Bentzen compared them to other searches that had massive increases this year as the world was shut down. The increase in prayer searches was greater, she found, than the increase in searches for takeout food, and was even in the same ballpark (about 1/8 the size) as the increases in internet searches for Netflix.

Of course, googling prayers is not the same as praying, any more than googling Netflix is the same as subscribing to it. A recent Pew survey addressed self-reported changes in actual prayer behavior. It found that over half of all U.S. adults say they have prayed for an end to the spread of the coronavirus. Among those who said they’ve prayed were Americans who don’t identify as Christian or any organized religion, and people who say the rarely or never pray.

I fall in the categories of people who don’t identify as Christian, and of people who rarely or never pray, so I can’t speak from personal experience about the place of prayer in the country’s response to the pandemic. But that could easily change, if the threat of covid became more personal. There have been times of great stress, when someone in my family has been sick or injured, where I’ve felt the emotional need to pray just in case, and I have done it, fervently and with all my heart.

But for now, I’m concentrating on staying healthy, being careful and listening to the medical experts. For those who can also draw on a higher power to get you through the pandemic, more power to you.

Thanks,
Dorn
10/4/2020